Reply To: Specialized Address Operations

I don’t think it would be a good idea to expose the internal use metadata to the programmer without any defined interface, which memory access basically would mean. I think it’s a good distinction to have hardware controlled flags and software controlled flags. Starting to mix them likely would be the start of a whole new set of headaches.

As for using more than 3 bits as tags: in ghc, the tags are used to encode the number of arguments to an unvisited thunk of lazy evaluation and whether it already has been evaluated. If I remember the white paper correctly 4 bits instead of 3 bits would push the case coverage of 70% to well over 90%.