Request: withArrayLength

[Ross Paterson]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2004 at 09:04:35AM -0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
> We certainly want to be able to add new stuff to the FFI over time.
> There are several ways we might do this:
> 
>   (1) Just extend the existing interfaces (don't change semantics
>       of existing functions, though).
> 
>   (2) Add new modules only (not re-exported by Foreign)
> 
>   (3) Add new stuff to the hierarchical Foreign.XXX modules, but
>       not the non-hierarchical variants (and Foreign keeps the
>       same interface as the FFI spec).
> 
>   (4) Wait until we have versioned packages, and have separate 
>       ffi-1.0 and ffi-1.1 packages.

(3) seems to be working well for the H98 modules; in effect the switch to
hierarchical modules has given us one-off package versioning.  The only
problem is that the not-so-hierarchical module Foreign is in the base
package rather than haskell98, and I would argue that such an omnibus
module doesn't belong in the hierarchical libraries, even if it does
make your import list shorter.  How about moving it?