proposal: add 'unsafeCoerce'

[Simon Marlow]

John Meacham wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 20, 2006 at 02:45:13PM +0000, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
> 
>>Simon Marlow <simonmarhaskell at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>>>Now, can we say something portable about these uses?
>>>
>>>I'd like to have a precise (sound, if not complete) description of
>>>when it's safe to use unsafeCoerce in GHC, but it needs some careful
>>>thought.
>>
>>And not just GHC.  I think all the points you mention (below) would be
>>entirely reasonable for all implementations.
>>
>>
>>>  * cast that changes a phantom type, or changes a type that is not
>>>    reflected by a part of the value,
>>>    eg. 'unsafeCoerce (Left 3) :: Either Int a' should be fine for any
>>>    'a',
>>>
>>>  * casting a polymorphic type to the actual type of the runtime value.
>>>    That is, you can safely cast a value to its correct type.  (eg. in
>>>    Typeable.cast).
>>>
>>>  * casting an unboxed type to another unboxed type of the same size.
>>
>>There is one more important use case you haven't mentioned:
>>
>>    * casting from a newtype to the contained value (or vice versa).
>>
>>This latter type of cast is the only one I can remember ever having used
>>myself.
> 
> 
> there are very few safe uses of unsafeCoerce in jhc. the only ones
> guarenteed safe are
> 
>  * casting a recursive newtype to its representation and back (note,
>    recursive newtypes are chosen via a loop-breaking algorithm in the
>    compiler, so it is best to let it worry about this)
>  * casting arbitrary values of kind * to a system provided type 'Box'
>    and back again
>  * casting arbitrary values of kind ! (the kind of strict boxed values)
>    to a system provided type 'BoxBang' and back again

Is kind ! visible to the programmer?  How?  What are you allowed/not allowed to 
do with something of kind !?

I added a kind ! to GHC recently, but it has a very limited use: it's the kind 
of boxed/unlifted primitive types like ByteArray# and MutVar#.  So you can write 
polymorphic functions over boxed/unlifted things, and one day maybe have arrays 
of them.

Cheers,
	Simon