Re: Polymorphic strict fields

On Tue, 2007-05-01 at 09:50 -0700, Iavor Diatchki wrote:

Hello,

On 5/1/07, Duncan Coutts wrote:

...

On Mon, 2007-04-30 at 19:47 -0700, Iavor Diatchki wrote:

...

All of this leads me to think that perhaps we should not allow strictness annotations on polymorphic fields. Would people find this too restrictive?

Yes.

Our current implementation of stream fusion relies on this:

data Stream a = forall s. Unlifted s => Stream !(s -> Step a s) -- ^ a stepper function !s -- ^ an initial state

We use strictness on polymorphic (class constrained) fields to simulate unlifted types. We pretend that the stream state types are all unlifted and have various strict/unlifted type constructors:

This declaration uses existential and not universal quantification. More concretely, there exists some type that classifies the state of the stream but the users of the stream do not know what it is (by the way I saw Don talk about this stream stuff and I think that it is quite cool!). A polymorphic field is one where the ``forall`` is associated with the field (it comes after the constructor), it allows you to store polymorphic values in a datatype.

Ah ok. When you said "strictness annotations on polymorphic fields" I assumed you meant just ordinary things like: data A a = A !a rather than local universal quantification. Duncan