alson:
We had a short discussion on the IRC channel the other day about Arrays. I advocated that we do some refactoring work and didn't meet with overwhelming disagreement, so I wanted to propose that the Arrays interfaces be refactored in Haskell'.
As a Haskell new-ish-bie, the various Array interfaces seem a bit inconsistent and make learning/using arrays complicated. I *do* understand how to use arrays in Haskell, but I think that the interface could be cleaned up.
Examples of current confusions: IArray and Array are dupes (obvious); listArray for IArray, but newListArray for MArrays; "!" for IArray, but readArray for MArrays.
And unsafeRead/unsafeWrite are too verbose. They are usually (almost always?) safe (since the code does its own checks), so perhaps this essential-for-performance interface should have nicer names? They're not in the same unsafe league that unsafePerformIO is. Just something I pondered during the shootout massacre a couple of weeks back. Cheers, Don