On 07 April 2005 07:54, Henning Thielemann wrote:
The version of Data.Bits which is shipped with GHC-6.2 is marked as experimental. So changes in the API are still possible? :-]
My experiments suggest that the functions should have a different order of arguments. Many of the functions of this module alter some bits in a machine word, thus they can be considered as update functions and their type signature should end with a -> a. Then we could easily combine several operations this way
shiftL 2 . clearBit 7 . setBit 4 . setBit 1
instead of flip shiftL 2 . flip clearBit 7 . flip setBit 4 . flip setBit 1
or (`shiftL` 2) . (`clearBit` 7) . (`setBit` 4) . (`setBit` 1) .
I don't see the benefit of urging the programmer to use infix notation instead of prefix notation here, e.g. (w `shift` 2) instead of (shift 2 w).
On the whole I agree, but I'm inclined against changing this because it would break so much code gratuitously. I vote for just putting this down to a small mistake in the original design, and leaving it. If there's overwhelming support for the change of course we'll make it, but I doubt there will be. Also the order of the arguments to shift matches C's shift operators (although they are real infix operators, of course). Cheers, Simon