On 05/07/07, Paul Moore
The need I had for these is no longer current, but sometime I'll try an experiment and see how easy it is, on a relatively clean Windows box with just GHC installed, to grab and use these libraries.
Just for fun I had a go with crypto: - Found crypto 3.0.3 on hackage. - Tried to build, it depends on NewBinary - Found that on hackage, downloaded and built OK. Lots of scary warnings about happy, greencard etc, not being found during configure, but let's go on. - Installed NewBinary as I didn't know how to make crypto find it without installing it. I'm a bit nervous, as I don't know how to *un*install it after I've finished. And it installed to my C drive, where I'd really rather it went somewhere else. There is probably documentation on how to do this, but remember, all I really want to do is to write a tiny program to get the MD5 checksum of a file. Ah, well. Carry on. - crypto builds and installs OK. But where are the docs? Not installed anywhere obvious, not on hackage. Try google. - Found the crypto website, but aargh! It looks like 3.0.3 is out of date and there's a 4.x available. Never mind, that's not likely to have changed. - But no simple examples, and the haddoc docs show APIs, but not usage examples! Going for the obvious approach: import System.IO import Data.Digest.MD5 main = do h <- openBinaryFile "md5.hs" ReadMode s <- hGetContents h hClose h md5 <- hash s No surprise, this doesn't work. After all, hash wants [Octet], not String. OK, I know this is now getting beyond library availability. But it doesn't compare well to Python's "I want an md5 checksum of a file - check the docs, there's a library function built in, use it, no problems". I see you've already responded, and we're in broad agreement. So I won't labour the point. It's an infrastructure issue rather than a technical one, and it *will* improve. What will be interesting is how much the generally lousy Windows experience can be improved - as Duncan points out, installing development libraries on Windows, whether Haskell or C, is a hugely irritating pain. If no-one has found a good answer for C in all these years, it would be great if Haskell could even do slightly better :-) Regards, Paul.