On Sun, Nov 2, 2008 at 7:53 PM, Andrew Coppin
Bertram Felgenhauer wrote:
It's not going to be fixed by itself - the first comment for the bug report basically asks interested parties to submit a proposal for changing this.
Well I certainly don't have the skill to fix it. (Presumably all that array stuff is hard-wired into the compiler.)
Actually, it isn't. The code - the bounds-checking code, at least - is fairly plain haskell in the Array package. You could take a look and, quite possibly, fix it.
In my opinion, what we should have is
1. An interface that is guaranteed-safe, no matter how inefficient that is.
2. An interface that is guaranteed-efficient, no matter how unsafe that is.
3. It should be extremely easy to switch from one to the other.
You write your code against the safe interface, test it until you're happy with it, and then switch to the fast interface.
Sounds good to me.
Currently, the "safe" interface actually allows out-of-bounds indicies (in a way which reveals the underlying implementation), and the "fast" interface isn't publicly supported. Both of these things should be changed.
Go ahead. :)