WordPtr,IntPtr,IntMax,WordMax

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

John Meacham:
> On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 03:29:16AM +0000, Aaron Denney wrote:
> > On 2006-04-29, Manuel M T Chakravarty <chak at cse.unsw.edu.au> wrote:
> > > Am Donnerstag, den 06.04.2006, 16:37 -0700 schrieb John Meacham:
> > >> On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 04:28:01PM -0700, John Meacham wrote:
> > >> > I was curious if ghc could support the following basic types, they will
> > >> > likely just be aliases of existing types.
> > >> > 
> > >> > WordPtr uintptr_t
> > >> > WordMax uintmax_t
> > >> > IntPtr  intptr_t
> > >> > IntMax  intmax_t
> > >> > 
> > >> > all these C types are defined by ISO C so should be available,
> > >> > otherwise, they are easy enough to generate in ghcs autoconf script.
> > >> > 
> > >> > jhc provides these under these names in Data.Word and Data.Int.
> > >> > they would be useful for writing jhc/ghc portable low level code, and
> > >> > writing 32/64 bit safe code.
> > >> 
> > >> oh, I forgot the all important conversion routines,
> > >> 
> > >> ptrToWordPtr :: Ptr a -> WordPtr
> > >> wordPtrToPtr :: WordPtr -> Ptr a
> > >> 
> > >> ptrToIntPtr :: Ptr a -> IntPtr
> > >> intPtrToPtr :: IntPtr -> Ptr a
> > >> 
> > >> jhc makes these available in Jhc.Addr, but if ghc decides to provide
> > >> them in a common spot (Foreign.Ptr maybe?)
> > >> 
> > >> then I will have jhc follow suit.
> > >> 
> > >> I'd also propose these be added to the FFI standard.
> > >
> > > I collect additions to the FFI on the Haskell' wiki:
> > >
> > >   http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/ForeignFunctionInterface
> > >
> > > I added a note about these types.  Any other ISO C types that we should
> > > include?
> > 
> > complex <foo>.
> 
> not ISO C, but I think they would be very cool to provide
> 
>  http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.0.0/gcc/Vector-Extensions.html
> 
> various vector (SSE, MMX, SIMD) types that are machine independent and
> compiled to whatever vector processing instructions the underlying arch
> supports. (pretty much all support some sort of them nowadays)

I agree that this would be cool, but I think it goes beyond Haskell'.
It is not just a matter of data types.  For it to be useful, you need to
generate the right code, too.

Manuel