On Nov 19, 2007, at 16:50 , Henning Thielemann wrote:
On Mon, 19 Nov 2007, Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
fromEnum and/or toEnum are helpful for this kind of thing, and I am
occasionally tempted to bind "cast = toEnum . fromEnum" because I
need it so much.
Really? I'd like to know which examples these are. So far I
suspected that
'cast' indicates not well chosen types.
If so, it's not my types... The specific instance is the one you
mentioned about times; fromEnum lets me turn a Foreign.C.Types.CTime
(== System.Posix.Types.EpochTime) to an Int (which is commonly just
type punning in GHC, since it's the same internal value
representation in most (all?) cases), from which I can get to another
Foreign.C.Types type with toEnum or to Integer with fromIntegral.
(NB: This involves an assumption about CTime; POSIX allows (or used
to allow) it to be a floating type in order to allow some non-
UNIXlikes to represent POSIX times. But given that CTime is Enum,
Foreign.C.Types already violates this; so why isn't it also Integral?)
So yes, this is a sign of typing issues in the implementation and
(toEnum . fromEnum) is a hack around them.
--
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH
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