Revised FFI syntax + typing

Alastair Reid reid at cs.utah.edu
Thu May 3 16:50:04 EDT 2001


> Why is Word a GHC extension?  Someone remind me?

It's not part of the Hugs-GHC standard which is what
we were working to when the ffi first came out.

It's not part of that standard because it was felt at the
time that bounded types with ill-defined ranges were a portability
problem waiting to happen.  (The alpha was still a viable machine
back then and we genuinely believed that Intel were going to 
produce a 64 bit processor in the near future.)

The fact that it's in there at all was just for backward compatability
reasons.  If we'd had DEPRECATE then, we might (???) even have deprecated
it?


--
A








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