Re: FFI, safe vs unsafe

if I may repeat myself (again), since my old suggestion now seems to agree with Wolfgang, Ross, and Simon: http://www.haskell.org//pipermail/haskell-prime/2006-March/001129.html ... so my suggestion would be to make no assumption about unannotated calls (don't rely on the programmer too much;), and to have optional keywords "atomic" and "non-reentrant". but yes, "non-reentrant" is rather too long - perhaps "external" (is outside Haskell and stays out)? foreign import - we don't know anything, some implementations might not support this foreign import atomic - function is neither blocking nor long-running foreign import external - function has no callbacks to Haskell cheers, claus --- Wolfgang Thaller: |Personally, I'm still in favour of inverting this. We are not in |court here, so every foreign function is guilty until proven |innocent. Every foreign function might be "longrunning" unless the |programmer happens to know otherwise. So maybe... "returnsquickly"? ---

On 2006-04-11, Ross Paterson wrote:

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On Tue, Apr 11, 2006 at 09:13:00AM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:

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- the default should be... concurrent reentrant, presumably, because that is the safest. (so we need to invert the notation). I think the name "concurrent" has a similar problem to "safe": it reads as an instruction to the implementation, rather than a declaration by the programmer of the properties of a particular function; as Wolfgang put it, "this function might spend a lot of time in foreign lands". I'd like to second this.

I agree. So other suggestions? longrunning? mightblock or mayblock? I don't much like 'nonreentrant', it's a bit of a mouthful. Any other suggestions for that? nocallback? Cheers, Simon _______________________________________________ Haskell-prime mailing list Haskell-prime@haskell.org http://haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime