[Haskell-cafe] Haskell vs GC'd imperative languages, threading, parallelizeability (is that a word? :-D )

[Andrew Coppin]

Stefan O'Rear wrote:
> Bool is 32 bits, but Don is using UArray.  UArray is not parametric in
> the element type, which means it's less generally useful (no UArray of
> Complex Double, for instance), but conversely it is able to use more
> efficient representations depending on the type.
>   

Would be nice if it *could* somehow be parametric... but I have 
absolutely no idea how you'd do that. The transformation is self-evident 
enough to a human, but how do you explain it to a machine?

(I somewhat suspect you'd have to bake this into the compiler itself it 
you wanted *arbitrary* types. Otherwise you'd have to write some special 
class that knows how to pack and unpack the data from the array, perhaps 
as a bundle of Word8s or something? Doesn't sound hugely fast...)