Bools are not unboxed

[Simon Marlow]

On 06 October 2004 11:36, Josef Svenningsson wrote:

> Simon Marlow wrote:
> 
>> On 06 October 2004 00:53, John Meacham wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>> This seems like it could be nicely generalized such that all
>>> enumeration types unbox to the unboxed integer of their offset. so
>>> 
>>> data Perhaps = Yes | Maybe | No
>>> 
>>> can unbox to an Int# with 0# == Yes 1# == Maybe and 2# == No.
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> Yes, a strict enumeration should be implemented as an Int#, both in
>> the strictness analyser and also when you {-# UNPACK #-} a
>> constructor field.  This is something we'd like to try, but haven't
>> got around to it yet.  Maybe a good bite-sized project for a budding
>> GHC hacker? :-) 
>> 
>> 
>> 
> Would it really be correct to translate it to Int#? AFAIK, unboxed
> values may not contain bottom while a data type most certainly can. I
> would imagine translating it to Int, and then relying on GHC's
> optimiser to optimize this into Int# whenever possible.

Note I said a *strict* enumeration.  You're right that in general it
wouldn't be correct to implement Bool by Int#.  Only when the strictness
analyser has determined that a function argument of enumeration type is
strict, or the programmer has added a strictness annotation to a
constructor field.

Certainly right now you can use Int everywhere instead of enumeration
types, and perhaps get better performance because GHC will unbox the Int
whenever possible.

Cheers,
	Simon