Alastair, You didn't respond to my proposal, perhaps because it didn't seem like one (I've changed a few words)
| a) Haskell finalisers should be available on all systems | | b) Finalisers can run at any GC point. The programmer needs to be aware | of this. Often it does not matter (e.g. calling 'free' to un-malloc | some space) but sometimes it does. | | c) On systems (like Hugs and NHC) that have no way to builds uninterruptible | sequences, you have to roll your own by calling C procedures. This is easy to specify and easy to implement. It frees stuff promptly (just after GC). The down-side is that if you are careless you can write stuff that mutates an IORef that is simultaneously mutated by a finaliser. In GHC you solve this with MVars. In Hugs you solve this by writing it in C. But either way, full Haskell is available for finalisers, and we have the nice simple interface that we all want. I feel I must be missing something. Simon _______________________________________________ FFI mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ffi
