dot:
On Sun, 19 Aug 2007, Peter Cai wrote:
My duty is writing a network server which talks to another server through a binary based private protocol.
Haskell needs something like Erlang's bit syntax.
http://erlang.org/doc/reference_manual/expressions.html#6.16 http://erlang.org/doc/programming_examples/bit_syntax.html#4 The IP header example in the latter is a brilliant real-world example.
It has recently been upgraded to support arbitrary bit streams. See http://www.it.uu.se/research/group/hipe/papers/padl07.pdf
Yes, we've looked at this in the context of Data.Binary. Rather than extending the core syntax, on option is to use Template Haskell, http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/BitSyntax-0.3 Another is to just use monad and pattern guards, which give quite reasonable syntax. -- Don