[Haskell-cafe] Re: Hugs vs GHC (again) was: Re: Some randomnewbiequestions

[Ben Rudiak-Gould]

Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk wrote:

 >"fileRead :: File -> FileOffset -> Integer -> Buffer -> IO ()"
 >
 >This is unimplementable safely if the descriptor is read concurrently
 >by different processes. The current position is shared.

... which is terrible library design, which we should avoid if at all 
possible, which is one of several reasons that I want to get rid of the 
notion of "current position". Hence the above prototype.

fileRead can be implemented in terms of OS primitives, and it's easy 
enough to implement a thread-safe seek/read interface on top of it. The 
reverse isn't true--if we provided seek/read, it would be very hard to 
implement fileRead safely. (Maybe that's what you were saying?)

-- Ben