Ketil Malde
It seemed to me, though, that streams are related to channels,
I'm not sure what exactly do you mean by streams (because they are only being designed), but differences are: - A stream is either an input stream or an output stream, while a single channel supports reading from one end and writing to the other end. - A stream passes around bytes, which are usually grouped in blocks for efficiency. A channel is polymorphic wrt. the element type and elements are always processed one by one. - A stream may be backed by an OS file, pipe, socket etc., while a channel exists purely in Haskell. - A channel is never closed. Reading more data than have been put blocks until someone puts more data. A stream can reach its end, which is a condition a reader can detect. A stream backed by a pipe is similar to a channel of bytes in that the reader blocks until someone puts more data, but it can be closed too, which causes the reader to observe end of file. A writer to a stream can block too when the internal buffer in the kernel is full. - A stream can be inherited by child processes, and it generally continues to work by being linked to the same data sink or source as before. A channel is inherited as a whole: there is no communication between the two versions of the channel in the two processes. -- __("< Marcin Kowalczyk \__/ qrczak@knm.org.pl ^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/