Gábor Lehel
Is there any sensible meaning for bangs on return types? I've been trying to think this through but not necessarily succeeding.
Not knowing Clean in any detail, I've always just thought that a type signature of, say: something :: !Foo -> Bar would mean the same as, in Haskell: something :: Foo -> Bar something foo = foo `seq` ... In this case, there's no point to a strict return type, since it would boil down to "x `seq` x", which is just "x". But it seems that a lot of these discussions are about considering Foo and !Foo distinct types, which would mean that you can no longer, say, add a strict and a lazy integer - at least not with the current Num instance. I find this line of thought very confusing.
This does seem a bit excessive. As a start, I don't remember anyone asking for control over (un)boxedness, so hopefully we could jettison that part of it?
Uh, you mean like in IOUArrays, the UNPACK pragma, or -funbox-strict-fields? Unboxing is an important optimization, but perhaps the current feature set suffices. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants