darcs patch: Remove unsafeCoerce-importing kludgery in favor of Uns...

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

ashley:
> John Meacham wrote:
> 
> >This is why I think an 'Unsafe.*' would be a bad idea. it would be a
> >dumping ground for lots of routines with nothing in common other than it
> >made someone uncomfortable at some point.
> 
> Isn't this a good idea? I want to know about this "uncomfortableness" 
> especially if I can use such "uncomfortable" routines to segfault my 
> program.
> 
> >I mean, think if all the
> >ByteString functions dealing with pointers had to move there because you
> >might pass in a bad pointer. 
> 
> They should be moved there, shouldn't they? All the unsafe stuff is in a 
> single module, Data.ByteString.Base. What's the purpose of this module? 
> Wouldn't that purpose be better served if it were put in Unsafe.*?
> 
> It's more helpful to me when reading a program to see the red flag 
> "import Unsafe.ByteString" rather than the apparently innocuous "import 
> Data.ByteString.Base"...

They are tagged as 'unsafeFoo', of course. So using, say, unsafeTail
does hint that you are to check a side condition yourself.

Btw, the *.Base form is inherited from Data.Array.Base.unsafeRead/Write.
The modules serve similar purposes.

-- Don