On Tue, 2007-10-23 at 16:34 +0200, Yitzchak Gale wrote:
Duncan Coutts wrote:
I'm very happy to get feedback on the API, the documentation or of course any bug reports.
It would be nice if the API could be the same for all character and data codecs.
Hmm, though the inputs and outputs are different types in general. With compression we're working with uninterpreted streams of bytes. For character encoding/decoding we're converting between internal Unicode representations and external representations as sequences of bytes. That is, (de)compression does not fit into encode :: [Word8] -> String decode :: String -> [Word8] If we parametrise over the input and output types we get something far too general. Also, from my point of view there's nothing wrong with giving (de)compression a different function name from character encoding. In my opinion it is easier to read: content <- return . decode . decompress =<< readFile file than content <- return . decode . decode =<< readFile file Where I mean to read a compressed unicode text file. Names are good! :-) Am I missing something or just being curmudgeonly? :-) Duncan