[Haskell-cafe] Mutable but boxed arrays?

[Isaac Dupree]

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.

Unboxing is, unfortunately, observable: it is not so easy to make a 
strict array of SomeArbitraryAlgebraicDataType, because it's not in 
class Storable.

Isaac