Expose the I8 constructor

[mglch]

The newtype I8 in Data.Text.Foreign does not expose its constructor. Is that intentional?

I would like to use I8 as a semantic distinction to prevent mixing up byte-offsets and character-offsets, in code that ultimately passes the values to takeWord8 and dropWord8.

[Lysxia]

I'm not sure whether the constructor is intentionally hidden, but since it's an instance of Integral you can easily convert to and from it with fromIntegral. What you describe is already exactly the purpose of I8 as I understand it. Do you still need the constructor to be exposed?

[phadej]

I'd use Enum instance, as that converts directly to/from Int. Integral goes through Integer, which is a bit excessive.

And indeed Enum instance kind of exposes the structure, so not exposing the constructor doesn't seem to add any value.