On Monday 10 May 2010 21:00:14, Ashish Agarwal wrote:
the Binary class as it is specialized to serializing values for Haskell
only
Can you please expand on this? I've been using Data.Binary to (de)serialize messages for some networking protocols, and have made all my types instances of Binary. Non-Haskell programs will be receiving and sending messages on one end, but I didn't think that mattered since my get and put functions are written to adhere to the protocol's definition. Is there some issue I'm missing?
I think the point was that derive (.., Binary) isn't a good idea when communicating with the Non-Haskell part of the world. If you write serialisation functions adhering to a specified protocol, defining a Binary instance for your types with those functions isn't going to do harm. Only it might give rise to confusion if somebody wants to transmit those types according to another protocol.