[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Top Level <-

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

On Sat, 30 Aug 2008, Ashley Yakeley wrote:

> Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:
>> This seems fine to me. It's based on something that already does work 
>> properly across a process scope,
>
> But you agree that IORefs define a concept of "process scope"?

I'm not sure that they *define* process scope, because it might be safe to 
use them across multiple processes; it depends on OS-dependent properties. 
But they exist *at least* at process scope.

>> instead of some new language feature that is actually hard to implement 
>> across the process scope.
>
> If we have a concept of "process scope", how is it hard to implement?

Because memory allocation is already implemented, and not in a 
Haskell-dependent way. If two completely separate Haskell libraries are 
present in the same process, linked together by a C program, they don't 
even know about each others existence. But they still don't share memory 
space.

Ganesh