On 16/07/2012 11:01, Roman Leshchinskiy wrote:
Thomas Schilling wrote:
To be fair, regardless of SH, I'd consider it good API design to put
unsafe things into a separate module.
I'll ask again: why is putting unsafe* functions into a separate module
preferable to just following the unsafe* naming convention? I'm honestly
interested in an answer - it seems to me that for someone who doesn't want
to use unsafe functions, the two approaches are essentially equivalent and
for someone who does, a separate module is more cumbersome.
Well, for one thing you can tell whether a module has access to unsafe
stuff by just looking at its imports. This argument applies both to
users (it's clearer when things are separated by module) and to the
implementation (we don't have to maintain a per-identifier safe flag,
which would complicate the implementation and bloat interface files).
The real problem here seems to be the clash between the meaning of
"unsafe" in the context of Vector, and the meaning of "unsafe" in Safe
Haskell. I don't see a good way to resolve that conflict, though of
course I think the definition of unsafe in Safe Haskell is sensible and
I'd like that to become the accepted meaning of the term. So far in
Haskell there has been no consistent definition of unsafe, which is
confusing for users.
Just to repeat what I said earlier, I don't see there being any
objection to putting unsafeRead with the other unsafe functions in
vector, even though technically it is safe.
Cheers,
Simon
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