[Haskell-cafe] Re: Go Haskell!

[Andrew Coppin]

Claus Reinke wrote:
> In general, I think Haskell has too many array libraries, with too
> many APIs. And that doesn't even take account the overuse of
> unsafe APIs, or the non-integrated type-level safety tricks - if array 
> accesses were properly optimized, there should be a lot less need for 
> the extreme all-or-nothing checks or home-grown
> alternative special-purpose APIs:
>
> - type-level code for watermarking indices belonging to certain    
> index sets is one step to eliminate index checks, but hasn't been
>    integrated into any of the standard libs
> - one could also associate index subsets with operations that do    
> not leave the index superset belonging to an array (eg, if    
> min<i<max, then min<=i+-1<=max, still safe without checks)
> - GHC does seem to common up index checks only if they are
>    identical, but if min<i<i+1<i+2<..<i+j<max, only the outer checks 
>    are really necessary (as long as we know about '+')
> - whole-array ops allow to avoid index checks without type-level
>    tricks, leaving the indexing implicit; but the corresponding ops
>    in Data.Array.MArray claim to construct new arrays, contrary
>    to the intended inplace updating for which one uses MArrays?
> - etc. etc.
>
> At least, uvector seems to take multi-element ops more seriously.
> But with so many people working on sequential and parallel Haskell
> array libraries, I was hoping for someone to take a big ax and clear
> out all that sick and half-dead wood, to give a small number of 
> healthy arrays libs room to grow. Would be a lot easier for us poor naive
> Haskell array users who otherwise tend to get lost in that forrest!-)

+3

The current array situation is unecessarily messy - and I prefer 
mathematical elegance to ad-hoc mess. (And you think I use Haskell, why 
exactly?)

Of course, it's all very well complaining about it... somebody still has 
to *do* all this wonderful stuff. :-/