25 Oct
2007
25 Oct
'07
12:40 p.m.
On 10/24/07, Neil Mitchell
Hi
Are there binary constants in Haskell, as we have, for instance, 0o232 for octal and 0xD29A for hexadecimal?
No, though it is an interesting idea.
You can get pretty close with existing Haskell though:
(bin 100010011)
where bin :: Integer -> Integer, and is left as an exercise for the reader. Obviously its not as high performance, as proper binary literals, but if you write them as top-level constants, they'll only be computed once and shouldn't end up being in the performance critical bits.
To make it efficient you could use Template Haskell and have the bin function generate the constant which could then be spliced in. I suppose it would look something like: $(bin 100010011) Not too bad. /Josef