[Haskell-cafe] Copy on read

[Dan Piponi]

On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 7:20 AM, Neil Mitchell <ndmitchell at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Jurriaan Hage and Stefan Holdermans. Heap recycling for lazy
>  languages. In John Hatcliff, Robert Glück, and Oege de Moor, editors,
>  _Proceedings of the 2008 ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Partial Evaluation
>  and Semantics-Based Program Manipulation_, PEPM'08, San Francisco,
>  California, USA, January 7--8, 2008, pages 189--197. ACM Press, 2008.
>  http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1328408.1328436.

If I'm reading it aright, it works by tagging the types of values as
unique or not but keeps that annotation secret from the programmer.
The typing rules are incredibly complicated so to make things less
scary, they are also hidden from the user. As a result, this idea
makes it impossible for a developer to reason about whether their code
will compile. That doesn't seem like a viable solution. Have I read
this correctly?

Cute idea though.
--
Dan