[Haskell-cafe] Small question

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| And, of course, if it's a strict argument, then the values stored are
| ALWAYS one of two possibilities.  So as a matter of curiosity, would
| there be any advantage at all for "unboxing" enumeration types?  (Apart
| from, I suppose, the possibility of using fewer than 32/64 bits to store
| a flag.)

Possibly some, but less now because of pointer tagging (see paper on my home page) http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/papers/ptr-tag/index.htm.  We've never gotten around to unboxing enumeration types because we couldn't convince ourselves that the win was big enough.  My nose tells me there is probably a small win, but whether it's worth the additional complexity I'm not sure.

S