On Feb 28, 2009, at 5:59 AM, Svein Ove Aas wrote:
I'm in the process of writing a distributed filesystem (in haskell, yay), which of course means I'm using Binary for de/serialization.
Now, that's fine enough, but for simplicity (and for wireshark), I'd like to be able to have Binary fall back on an instance based on Show/Read for any type that lacks any other Binary instance.
Rather than something funny with extensions, why not write two methods, of type defBinaryPut :: Show a => a -> Put defBinaryGet :: Read a => Get a Then, if somebody tries to use something lacking a Binary instance, they can just define a simple instance with those two methods. And when they want to improve performance, they just write better methods. :-) In fact, these seem useful enough to go into, if not Data.Binary itself, a separate package. After all, proper serialization shouldn't be a barrier to rapid prototyping. Cheers, S.