the Word type

[Alastair Reid]

> Comments in the Hugs sources claim that the Word type is deprecated,
> and it's not mentioned in the FFI spec, but it's present with a full
> set of instances in the libraries.  Which is right?

It is not part of the ffi spec because it can't be used in a portable
manner.  (The same problem goes for Int too, of course.)

I've argued for its complete removal from the libraries because the
vast majority of the code written with it will be non-portable.  I
think the counter-argument was that some portable usages are possible
with one of Chris Okasaki's data structures being an example.

So, at least for now, it remains alive and well in the Hugs code in
the interests of GHC-compatability and backwards-compatability.

Hopefully the comments in the Hugs source code (which were probably
added by me) match the above.

--
Alastair