On Dec 26, 2005 10:20 PM, Brian McQueen
How is this different from the (un)pickle process that has been discussed here recently?
There is one important difference in my mind. Most of the pickling code is concerned with turning haskell data into a binary stream that can later be turned back into haskell data. There is no interoperability required -- the thing that writes it is the thing that will read it. For parsing arbitrary binary data formats a few other important issues arise that you can sometimes forget about with pickling such as: ~ byte-alignment ~ big-endian vs little endian ~ size of data types (for example is Char one byte or four) ~ bitwise parsing Both pickling and binary format parsing can be built on the same underlying low-level binary access methods. I have also wondered if they might be able to share the same high level interface because they don't really seem that far removed from one another in many respects. But I have not had time to think about it much. SerTH can be used to derive pickling code for arbitrary haskell data types. And I am pretty sure I once saw code that could derive a binary parser from a C struct. So, there really does seem to be a lot of overlap. j.