FFI Report, CVS Id 1.4

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| Subject: FFI Report, CVS Id 1.4
| 
| ...is available at
| 
|   http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/ffi.{ps.gz,tex}

Good stuff, Manuel.  Thanks!

Suggestion: would you like to add this to the CVS repository.
Then others can get hold of it, and even modify it (e.g. correct
typos, add examples).  It's inefficient to type a message saying
"add a comma after "..bubble.."".

There's an obvious place for it.  The Haskell Report is in the
CVS repository cvs.haskell.org in the 'module' haskell-report.
Thus
	cvs checkout haskell-report

There is a sub-directory for report/ and another for libraries/,
so you could just create a directory for ffi/.   I'm unsure about
access permissions, but I'm copying Jeff Lewis who is root on
that machine.

=============

More generally, the spec is looking good. 

*  I strongly suggest however adding a brief collection of examples 
as Section 1.3  (or Section 2).

* Similarly, for each language-specific section, we must add a
collection of examples.
No one who was not intimately familiar with the FFI would
be able to make sense of 'import dynamic' or 'import wrapper'.  

* You mention en passant that there's a new type CInt.  Very good, but 
the full set of types (and their operations) must be defined in the 
language-specific sections.  Indeed, I suggest we take 3.2 and 
make it a top-level Section, with a sub-section for each language.

* "external types" are mentioned in 3.2.1 but nowhere defined.

* Nowhere do you say that in 
	foreign import ... foo :: type
  that this defines the Haskell variable 'foo' with type 'type'.
(Currently
  it's just "defines a variable", with nothing about type.)

* I think we are agreed that the stuff about marshalling libraries
belongs in
this document too.  Much of it is already written.  Could it be
incorporated?