On mån, 2004-01-26 at 12:22 -0500, Gregory Wright wrote:
Hi Dominic,
First, thanks to everyone for their help.
RIght now, I'm leaning toward Dominic's solution of a collection of helper functions, but I have the feeling that we should be generating them automatically. After all, given a buffer that consists of packed, fixed width fields, if we specify a name and width of the field, making the helper functions should be straightforward. (I understand the network byte order issues. Since I won't always have to examine each field, I wasn't going to convert all fields to host byte order, rather only convert the ones I needed to examine.)
It's a little strange that we seem to have to use template haskell or some other preprocessor to do this. Rather like using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.
I'll try to come up with something of general use. I'm very interested to see Tom's (de)serialization framework. As long as this problem is going to require TH, we may as well solve more than one problem.
And now I let you return to your discussion of the tab character ;-)
Best Wishes, Greg
You'll probably want to take a look at Erlang's so called ``bit syntax'' at http://www.erlang.se/euc/00/bit_syntax.html. It's very nifty, and I'd love to see it (or something equally convenient) as a Haskell extension. Hugs and kisses, Mikael Brockman