Unlifted data types

[Simon Peyton Jones]

|  And to
|  be honest, I'm not sure we need arbitrary data types in Unlifted;
|  Force (which would be primitive) might be enough.

That's an interesting thought.  But presumably you'd have to use 'suspend' (a terrible name) a lot:

type StrictList a = Force (StrictList' a)
data StrictList' a = Nil | Cons !a (StrictList a)

mapStrict :: (a -> b) -> StrictList a -> StrictList b
mapStrict f xs = mapStrict' f (suspend xs)

mapStrict' :: (a -> b) -> StrictList' a -> StrictList' b
mapStrict' f Nil = Nil
mapStrict' f (Cons x xs) = Cons (f x) (mapStrict f xs)


That doesn't look terribly convenient.

| ensure that threads don't simply
|  pass thunks between each other. But, if you have unlifted types, then
|  you can have:
|  
|      data UMVar (a :: Unlifted)
|  
|  and then the type rules out the possibility of passing thunks through
|  a reference (at least at the top level).

Really? Presumably UMVar is a new primitive? With a family of operations like MVar?  If so can't we just define
	newtype UMVar a = UMV (MVar a)
	putUMVar :: UMVar a -> a -> IO ()
	putUMVar (UMVar v) x = x `seq` putMVar v x

I don't see Force helping here.

Simon