[Haskell] Compilation of big, static tables

[John Meacham]

On Thu, Feb 23, 2006 at 10:40:31AM +0000, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
> What I would really like is a syntax to statically construct an array,
> without having to compute it from a list.  I'm not sure that even
> Template Haskell can help here, since there is no normal form for it to
> translate to.

This is exactly what my ForeignData proposal on the haskell-prime wiki
is meant to address
http://haskell.galois.com/cgi-bin/haskell-prime/trac.cgi/wiki/ForeignData

It is trivial to implement and seems like a straightforward accidental
omission in the FFI spec so I'd like to see it go in.

though, I only have it specified for creating pointers to data, it
wouldn't be much trickier to make it work for haskell unboxed arrays
too (though, you can just make a StorableArray out of them easily as
stands)

Plus, if this were in haskell I can honestly say "Haskell can do
everything C can do but better" without mubling something about with a
few caveats under my breath :)

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈