On 11 November 2010 21:23, C. McCann
[Snip] What started this thread, however, was the idea of a serialization function producing something like a pure ByteString, and why that, as opposed to (IO ByteString), would be extremely problematic.
I think the original poster was intrigued by the possibilities serializing functions and their first guess a type signature was a MacGuffin[*]. Its a lot of work to implement persistence. As far as I know its only implemented for the Windows version of Clean. Napier 88's persistent store was a very substantial development effort for a programing language research project - multi-person, multi-year, EU funded through the ESPRIT Basic Research programme. [*] In case anyone looks up MacGuffin on Wikipedia, I don't think the description there is strictly accurate. A MacGuffin doesn't drive the plot so much as throw the viewer of the scent.