You might look at this paper: http://research.microsoft.com/Users/simonpj/Papers/weak.htm "Stretching the storage manager: weak pointers and stable names in Haskell" - Simon Peyton Jones, Simon Marlow, and Conal Elliott, IFL'99.
It describes a solution to exactly the problem you're trying to solve, that's implemented in GHC. It may not be the right thing for you, but you may be interested to see previous approaches to the problem in any case. Cheers, Tim -- Tim Chevalier* catamorphism.org *Often in error, never in doubt "Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king, the king ain't satisfied until he rules everything" -- Bruce Springsteen _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
