[Haskell-cafe] Re: Mutable but boxed arrays?

[Simon Marlow]

Ketil Malde wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-09-05 at 20:37 +0200, Henning Thielemann wrote:
>> Can someone explain me, why there are arrays with mutable but boxed 
>> elements?
> 
> I, on the other hand, have always wondered why the strict arrays are
> called "unboxed", rather than, well, "strict"?  Strictness seems to be
> their observable property, while unboxing is just an (admittedly
> important) implementation optimization.  I imagine that it'd be at least
> as easy to implement the strictness as the unboxedness for non-GHC
> compilers, and thus increase compatibility.

You're quite right, that was a mistake, we should have called them strict 
arrays.  Hugs implements the unboxed arrays without any kind of unboxing, I 
believe.

Cheers,
	Simon