On Mon, Apr 02, 2007 at 03:26:05PM +0100, Daniel Brownridge wrote:
Hello.
I am a Computer Science student attempting to write an emulator using Haskell. One of my main design choices is how to deal with machine code. Clearly it is possible to represent 0's and 1's as ASCII characters, however it strikes me that it would be much nicer to the I/O using raw binary. I don't seem to be able to find much documentation on this. Does anybody know how it's done, or can point me in the direction of some resources.
The current Big Name in Haskell's binary support is the aptly named 'binary' library, available from hackagedb (http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/binary-0.3). binary works using two sets of functions, one for very efficiently building binary bytestrings (like [Char] -> [Char]): data Builder --abstract empty, append -- monoid ops singleton :: Word8 -> Builder putWord16be :: Word8 -> Builder ... toLazyByteString :: Builder -> ByteString and a monad for parsing binary data: data Get a -- abstract getWord8 :: Get Word8 getWord16be :: Get Word16 ... runGet :: Get a -> ByteString -> a (there's also a higher level interface paterned on Read/Show, but I don't think that's applicable here). Stefan