On 17 September 2010 03:18, Henning Thielemann
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic schrieb:
The problem with this is: unsafe* functions would be better called "yesIGuaranteeThatUsingThisFunctionDoesResultInAReferentiallyTransparentEntityAndItsOKForMeToUseIt*". They are "unsafe" in that you shouldn't use them blindly.
I think such a long and descriptive name would be helpful, since there seem to be many programmers, that do not know, that functions using unsafePerformIO must be referentially transparent.
Maybe we need more documentation then? A better question is "why are you using unsafePerformIO?" (then again, I know a first year student that used it to get random numbers out of System.Random for an assignment - when randomness wasn't needed - because he didn't understand the explicit passing stuff we do and didn't bother asking).
My suggestion is to move the Unsafe modules to a new package 'unsafe'. Then you can easily spot all "dirty" packages by looking at reverse dependencies of 'unsafe'.
Hooray, yet another supposedly stand-alone library that GHC will depend on and thus can't be upgraded anyway, so there's no real advantage of making it stand-alone (after all, doesn't base use unsafeInterleaveIO or something for lazy IO?). -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com