On 10 Aug 2014, at 07:04, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
I'm +1 on the re-exporting (I would be tempted to go the whole hog and re-export all the Word* types as well).
I was involved in the discussions when the Word type was originally added to Haskell, primarily for the use of the FFI. As I recall, people were deeply uncomfortable that there should even be a Word type, with unspecified precision. The types Word8, Word16, Word32, and Word64 were entirely uncontroversial, because you know what you are dealing with. The primary use of the Word* types was to represent machine words (bytes, half-words, etc), enabling (for instance) bit-twiddling of individual components of the word. With an unknown-precision Word value, you can guarantee nothing about whether your bit-operation will work. I believe the use of unknown-precision Word to represent non-negative integers was the winning justification, but it remains controversial in the same way that Int (rather than Int32, or Integer) does. Lack of clarity over whether or when a number overflows is a pretty bad downside. Pragmatically, it may work OK for most people most of the time. But the Haskell way is to prefer correctness. Regards, Malcolm