the Word type

[Ross Paterson]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2003 at 11:08:15AM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
> Alastair wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> I think it's there for symmetry, not much else.  Word suffers from the
> same problems as Int, so while we have one we might as well have the
> other.

OK, the question is whether Hugs should provide it with a full set of
instances, including Storable, and allow it as a foreign type.