John Meacham wrote:
On Tue, Feb 21, 2006 at 10:15:59AM +0000, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
John Meacham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I generalized this primitive to
drop__ :: a -> b -> b
Also known in the Prelude as "const"...
well, 'flip const' but yes.
The difference is that you propose it be primitive, with the intention
that a clever compiler should not be able to bypass it by inlining its
definition and propagating the loss of the first argument outwards.
sure, well whatever is required on a given compiler to ensure it has the
above qualities, which might mean making it a primitive or have it have
some compiler-specific pragmas attached.
Your drop__ reminds me of GHC's touch#, which is like drop__ in the IO
monad. We use it to control lifetimes, eg. inside withForeignPtr. You
could implement drop in terms of touch#:
drop__ a b = case touch# a realworld# of s -> b
I'm not sure about the other way around. Something like "touch# a s =
drop__ (a,s) s" looks possible, but is wrong - the compiler can see the
same s is returned.
touch# compiles to no code at all in GHC, which is what you want, but it
does keep its argument alive as far as the GC is concerned - that
behaviour isn't necessary (is undesirable?) for drop__.
Cheers,
Simon
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