Prefix form of unboxed tuple

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| You might expect there to be a prefix form of the unboxed tuple:
|
| Prelude> case (#,#) 1 2 of (# a , b #) -> error $ show (a,b)
| <interactive>:1:7: parse error on input `,'
|
| But there isn't.

No real reason why not.  If you write

foo :: a -> b -> (# a,b #)
foo x y = (# x, y #)

then foo should work just fine.  So what you want needs two things:

* We would have to define a collection of such functions in the Prelude (see Data.Tuple, for the (,,,,) functions).

* We'd have to do is to make the parser understand '(#,,,#)'.

Do add a feature request if you like.  (And/or implement it!) It'd be a good "rounding out" thing.

Another feature I'd like is for unboxed tuples to be more first class. For example, we don't currently allow
        f :: (# a, b #) -> ...
But there's no real reason why not; we could transform them away just before code generation. That would eliminate all special cases for unboxed tuples, except the constraints that apply to all unboxed types (notably: you can't instantiate a type variable with an unboxed type; unboxed types are strict).

If you add a feature request, add that too!

Simon