unsafeShift operations for Data.Bits

[John Meacham]

On Mon, Nov 06, 2006 at 02:09:18PM -0500, Samuel Bronson wrote:
> It isn't really *unsafe*, exactly. But it might not be purely
> functional. However, it isn't imperative or anything like that. Also,
> for rotate, I needed to change the implementations in the *libraries*
> (it was only the GHC-specific implementations, though). (Also, nobody
> seems to have applied that patch yet for some reason.) And I needed to
> change them to use the raw, unchecked primops.
> 
> Oh, that reminds me. Why call them "unsafe"? Why not "unchecked" as
> GHC's primops are called?

yes definitely. we should reserve 'unsafe' for when we really mean it.

I see three levels of unsafeness, and try to use them appropriately.

unsafeFoo - can break the static properties of the program. such as
unsafePerformIO breaking typesafety, or the obvious unsafeCoerce

unwiseFoo - can break dynamic properties of the program, the program
will not go wrong or see any inconsistant results within a single run,
but it might see different ones if run again or on a different machine.

uncheckedFoo - under certain conditions that arn't checked for, this
routine may produce well defined, but unspecified behavior. (as in, the
behavior might depend on something compiler or architecture specific)

        John

-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈