ashley:
John Meacham wrote:
This is why I think an 'Unsafe.*' would be a bad idea. it would be a dumping ground for lots of routines with nothing in common other than it made someone uncomfortable at some point.
Isn't this a good idea? I want to know about this "uncomfortableness" especially if I can use such "uncomfortable" routines to segfault my program.
I mean, think if all the ByteString functions dealing with pointers had to move there because you might pass in a bad pointer.
They should be moved there, shouldn't they? All the unsafe stuff is in a single module, Data.ByteString.Base. What's the purpose of this module? Wouldn't that purpose be better served if it were put in Unsafe.*?
It's more helpful to me when reading a program to see the red flag "import Unsafe.ByteString" rather than the apparently innocuous "import Data.ByteString.Base"...
They are tagged as 'unsafeFoo', of course. So using, say, unsafeTail does hint that you are to check a side condition yourself. Btw, the *.Base form is inherited from Data.Array.Base.unsafeRead/Write. The modules serve similar purposes. -- Don