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

[Ashley Yakeley]

Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:
> In any case, what I'm trying to establish below is that it should be a 
> safety property of <- that the entire module (or perhaps mutually 
> recursive groups of them?) can be duplicated safely - with a new name, 
> or as if with a new name - and references to it randomly rewritten to 
> the duplicate, as long as the result still type checks.

That's not acceptable. This would cause Unique to break, as its MVar 
would be created twice. It would also mean that individual Unique and 
IOWitness values created by <- would have different values depending on 
which bit of code was referencing them. It would render the extension 
useless as far as I can see.

It also introduces odd execution scopes again. In order for <- to work, 
it must be understood that a given <- initialiser in a given module in a 
given version of a given package will execute at most once per RTS. But 
your restriction breaks that.

It's worth mentioning that the current Data.Unique is part of the 
standard base library, while hs-plugins is rather experimental. 
Currently Data.Unique uses the "NOINLINE unsafePerformIO" hack to create 
its MVar. If hs-plugins duplicates that MVar, that's a bug in 
hs-plugins. It's up to a dynamic loader to get initialisation code correct.

-- 
Ashley Yakeley