[Haskell] Expecting more inlining for bit shifting

[John Meacham]

On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 09:48:31AM +0100, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> | I would think the easiest way to go about this would be to extend the
> | rules pragma.
> | 
> | {-# RULES "shift/const-inline"  forall x y# . shift x y# = ... #-}
> | 
> | where variables ending in # will only match constants known at compile time
> 
> Interesting idea.  GHC can do that *internally* using a "BuiltinRule", and it's internal precisely because there's no obvious way to say "match only a literal".
> 
> I suppose that you might also want to say "match only a constructor"?  To have a rule for 'f' that would fire only when you saw
> 		f (Just x)
> or		f Nothing
> but not	f (g y)
> 
> For that, a # would not really be appropriate.  
> 
> 
> Would this be valuable?  If so, think of a nice syntax.  It's not trivial to implement, but not hard either.

heh. thinking of a nice syntax is what has kept me from exposing this
behavior to the user in jhc so far. :) 

I am thinking something like the following:

{-# RULES "shift/const-inline"  forall x y | is_constant y . shift x y = ... #-}

which uses '|' like in pattern matching, where it specifies a condition
the variable has to meet. so 'is_constant' will say whether y is
completely known at compile time.

the nice thing about this syntax is that it is extendable pretty easily

{-# RULES "foo/known"  forall x y | is_whnf y . foo x y =  ... #-}

where is_whnf will test whether y is bound directly to a constructor or
a lambda expression.  


        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈