On Thu, 25 Oct 2018, David Feuer wrote:
Ptr Word8 is not (just) a pointer to byte-addressable memory. It's specifically a pointer to something representing an 8-bit unsigned integer. If you use a Ptr Word8 for the address of a floating point value, then you are *wrong* (or doing something very weird, anyway). To quote the documentation,
A value of type Ptr a represents a pointer to an object, or an array of objects, which may be marshalled to or from Haskell values of type a.
Interesting observations. There are the Storable methods peekByteOff :: Ptr b -> Int -> IO a pokeByteOff :: Ptr b -> Int -> a -> IO () They ignore the target types of their pointers. Should be Addr, then, too? And if we are touching Storable class, how about passing Proxy's to sizeOf and alignment instead of undefined values? Maybe we should add new methods to Storable class with default implementations that redirect to the old methods.