CStrings

[malcolm-ffi at cs.york.ac.uk]

> > Once these newer features are settled, I look forward to seeing a
> > portable implementation.
> 
> I don't understand. How can they settle if they are absent?

What do you mean by "absent"?  I thought you had a proposal.  I was
just asking for it to be recognised as a proposal rather than a
standard, because we haven't had any experience with using it yet.

Just by looking at the names and type signatures, I'm not even
sure what each proposed function does.  Could you describe them in
a little more detail?

My request for a portable implementation is because, now that the
basic common FFI is settled, I believe we should be using it to ensure
that new proposals such as yours are not restricted to GHC-only,
like so many existing libraries sadly are.

> And most of
> discussed functions (except C strings and errno) do have portable
> implementations in terms of other functions.

Ah, are you saying that treatment of C strings cannot have an
implementation that is portable across Haskell compilers?  I'm sorry,
but if this was your intention, it wasn't clear from your original
message.

Regards,
    Malcolm