[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANN: A triple of new packages for talking tothe outside world

"David Roundy" wrote:

On Jan 9, 2008 10:10 AM, Dominic Steinitz wrote:

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Duncan Coutts writes:

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The difficulty is in deciding what the api should be. Does it give you a real bitstream or only a byte aligned one? If I ask for 3 bits then 15 bytes what does it do? Does it assume I meant 3 bits, then pad to the next byte boundary and get 15 bytes, or does it mean get 15 bytes but at this 3 bit shift offset?

I'd suggest an aligned and unaligned api.

So the aligned api would get 3 bits and the 15 bytes would start from the next byte boundary.

The unaligned api would get 3 bits and the 15 bytes (=15 x 8 bits) would finish still with an offset of 3.

Do you mean we'd have an unalignedGetBytes as well as getBytes (which would remain aligned)? That would make sense, but it would seem a bit heavy to duplicate all of the binary API.

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