Re: safe vs. unsafe (Was: Haskell Platform proposal: Add the vector package)

On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 2:11 PM, Bas van Dijk wrote:

On 11 July 2012 20:49, Henning Thielemann wrote:

...

I think the idea was to have Unsafe modules and move the unsafe functions there. :-)

Indeed. I don't see the point about having .Safe modules. Modules should be safe by default as you mentioned before. I guess the reason we have .Safe modules in base and vector is for backwards compatibility.

The ideal, but currently, impossible way of dealing with this is to mark the _export_ of unsafe functions in a module as DEPRECATED and in a later version remove the unsafe functions and mark the module as Trustworthy. However this requires support for deprecating exports:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/4879

But why? The number of people who will benefit from this mass deprecation/mass migration is tiny. -- Johan