tomasz.zielonka:
On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 03:39:48PM +1100, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
And unsafeRead/unsafeWrite are too verbose. They are usually (almost always?) safe (since the code does its own checks),
The same can be said about most uses of unsafePerformIO - you wouldn't be using it if you weren't certain that your program will behave properly.
so perhaps this essential-for-performance interface should have nicer names?
Any primitive with can destroy the nice properties of Haskell when *misused* should be marked as unsafe. The point is that you can do anything with other nice, non-unsafe functions and you will still stay within the semantics of the language.
If you don't like those long names, nobody is stopping you from defining your own local bindings. Thanks to inlining, it should be as efficient as using unsafeWrite/unsafeRead directly.
They're not in the same unsafe league that unsafePerformIO is.
Why not? With unsafeWrite you can write to any address in memory, so you can crash the program, change values which should be constant, etc. Perhaps unsafeRead is not that dangerous, but you can surely cause SEGV with it.
It's not a terribly serious suggestion ;) I just found that using unsafeRead/Write is very important for shootout entries (we used it a lot -- it's the only way to beat C), but a lot uglier on the page than (the equally dangerous) peek/poke, which get nice short names for some reason. Cheers, Don