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How to make a value uncomparable
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Date: | 2008-04-23 (13:49) |
From: | Berke Durak <berke.durak@e...> |
Subject: | How to make a value uncomparable |
Well, as comparing non-canonical datastructures such as Sets and Maps with Pervasives.compare is unsafe, I was thinking of ways to make sure that you don't do such a thing. Our resident type experts could tell us if uniqueness types could be used for that purpose, but if you're willing to settle for run-time safety, here is a little solution. Pervasives.compare will refuse to run on heap values wrapped in an Abstract_tag, whose purpose is to stop the GC from nosing below the tag. So if you have a value that's not Pervasives.compare-comparables, you can wrap it inside such a tag, and any call to Pervasives.compare will raise an invalid_arg. But how? You could of course write a piece of native code, but it happens that the Abstract_tag is used by the Weak module. So here's an Uncomparable module, that makes any value run-time Pervasives-uncomparable, at a cost of six extra words per value (if I'm correct). module Uncomparable : sig type 'a t val make : 'a -> 'a t val get : 'a t -> 'a end = struct type 'a t = 'a * 'a Weak.t let make x = let w = Weak.create 1 in Weak.set w 0 (Some x); (x, w) let get (x, _) = x end # #use "mkuncmp.ml";; module Uncomparable : sig type 'a t val make : 'a -> 'a t val get : 'a t -> 'a end # Uncomparable.make 33;; - : int Uncomparable.t = <abstr> # let x = Uncomparable.make 33;; val x : int Uncomparable.t = <abstr> # let y = Uncomparable.make 33;; val y : int Uncomparable.t = <abstr> # compare x y;; Exception: Invalid_argument "equal: abstract value". # Uncomparable.get x;; - : int = 33 # Uncomparable.get y;; - : int = 33 -- Berke DURAK