Hi Bertram,
Currently I have a single module that provides reading operations for Integers and Ints. I'm not quite sure what to do with it.
Get it into base! Where it is, or what its called is less relevant - perhaps entirely decoupled from the Read class, and I wouldn't have thought reading octal integers etc was useful - just simple bog standard integers. I'd really like just readInt/readInteger in Numeric, or Prelude, or possibly even a new Read style module.
I'm pondering breaking compatibility with Haskell 98 to some extent and implementing read instances for Int and Integer that don't diverge on weird inputs, but handle all valid numbers that Haskell 98 supports.
Thats nice, but a stand alone readInt that is not tied to reads, and the whole "leftover parse" thing can be dropped - probably for better performance. Of course, making an existing read faster is also good.
It also includes a simple benchmark for comparing reads, Numeric.readDec and my readInteger functions. Results for my computer are included as well.
Any chance of a very quick summary of the results? i.e. on average x% faster, but y% faster for integers over size z? Saves everyone darcs's in. As far as I am concerned, the code is a black box, but the statistics are something everyone will want. Thanks Neil