On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 08:54:14PM +1000, Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
Ross Paterson:
The FFI spec refers to types Int8, Int16, Int32, Int64, Word8, Word16, Word32, Word64, Ptr a, FunPtr a and StablePtr a. Perhaps they should move to the Prelude when the non-library part of the FFI spec is incorporated into the Report?
If we have these types in the Prelude, the associated functions should be in the Prelude, too, and I'd be reluctant to include operations that are not memory-safe in the Prelude. So, I think, we need at least a standard library for the FFI. (In the FFI spec, we after all went to a lot of trouble to realise as much as possible of the needed functionality as libraries, to change the core language as little as possible.)
The difference is that the types are used by the core language definition (section 3.2 of the FFI Addendum), and the functions aren't.