Proposal: Export Data.Word.Word from Prelude

Johan Tibell johan.tibell at gmail.com
Tue Aug 26 12:00:53 UTC 2014


On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 1:56 PM, Malcolm Wallace <malcolm.wallace at me.com>
wrote:

> I deeply appreciate the need for unsigned fixed-width integers, but I
> oppose the exposure of Word, because there are no guarantees on what its
> fixed width is.  Hence, you cannot know when it will be dangerous to use.
> By all means expose Word8, Word16, Word32, Word64 instead.  Their names
> provide a greater hint to the programmer that they have limitations, and
> that the programmer should check carefully whether those limitations are
> appropriate for their usage.
>

The problem is that now you cannot express "the largest fixed-sized,
unsigned int that can be handled efficiently". Word64 is terribly slow on
32-bit machines.
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