4 May
2001
4 May
'01
4:50 a.m.
Why is Word a GHC extension? Someone remind me?
It's not part of the Hugs-GHC standard which is what we were working to when the ffi first came out. It's not part of that standard because it was felt at the time that bounded types with ill-defined ranges were a portability problem waiting to happen. (The alpha was still a viable machine back then and we genuinely believed that Intel were going to produce a 64 bit processor in the near future.) The fact that it's in there at all was just for backward compatability reasons. If we'd had DEPRECATE then, we might (???) even have deprecated it? -- A