Array interface refactoring

[Tomasz Zielonka]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 03:39:48PM +1100, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> And unsafeRead/unsafeWrite are too verbose. They are usually (almost
> always?) safe (since the code does its own checks),

The same can be said about most uses of unsafePerformIO - you wouldn't
be using it if you weren't certain that your program will behave
properly.

> so perhaps this essential-for-performance interface should have nicer
> names? 

Any primitive with can destroy the nice properties of Haskell when
*misused* should be marked as unsafe. The point is that you can do
anything with other nice, non-unsafe functions and you will still stay
within the semantics of the language.

If you don't like those long names, nobody is stopping you from defining
your own local bindings. Thanks to inlining, it should be as efficient
as using unsafeWrite/unsafeRead directly.

> They're not in the same unsafe league that unsafePerformIO is.

Why not? With unsafeWrite you can write to any address in memory, so you
can crash the program, change values which should be constant, etc.
Perhaps unsafeRead is not that dangerous, but you can surely cause SEGV
with it.

Or am I missing something?

Best regards
Tomasz

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