On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Mark Carroll wrote:
I figured it would be quite a waste having the computer convert the data to human-readable form and then parsing it again when a human's not going to be reading the intervening datastream. Even just converting the numbers to ASCII and back takes time when there's quite a few of them. Of course, I can get by with an inefficient version where I have to write some pickling and unpickling code for lots of my types, until something better shows up! I assume it will someday.
I am not sure about the status for ghc but there is a Binary class (even with deriving) in the nhc compiler http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/nhc98/libs/Binary.html a Native class in hbc http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~augustss/hbc/hbc_library.html#Native (For downloading hbc, read http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2001-June/001331.html) A quick search for ghc Binary gave me this links which seems to provide a port nhc's Binary that works with ghc. http://www.pms.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/mitarbeiter/panne/haskell_libs/Bin... You could ask Sven Panne directly for details. I hope this helps, Patrik Jansson