I have no problems with marshalling/unmarshalling (and even with the implicit casting going on). What I dislike is having a bunch of functions which are "the same" but with different names, where the difference boils down to enumerated types that end up being encoded in the function name. Regardless of type safety. Jacques Tim Newsham wrote:
Am I the only one who finds this encoding-of-types in the _name_ of a function quite distateful? There is no type safety being enforced here, no ensuring one will not be encoding a Ptr one way and decoding it another. Why not use Haskell's type system to help you there?
When marshalling data you often don't want any type safety. You often want to explicitely linearize data from one type and then unlinearize it into another type. The net result is that of casting. In fact, you can write a marshalling library with an interface based entirely on this concept:
http://www.lava.net/~newsham/x/Pkts5.lhs
The interface is, in essense, a glorified casting mechanism. To marshall data you convert it to an array of bytes and to unmarshall data you unconvert it.
Jacques
Tim Newsham http://www.lava.net/~newsham/