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

[Spencer Janssen]

On Friday 10 August 2007 12:37:31 Andrew Coppin wrote:
> 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?


Check out the various papers, slides, and talks on NDP/parrallel arrays.  
There's much discussion on schemes to efficiently pack data types into 
unboxed arrays.


Cheers,
Spencer Janssen


> (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...)