On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 10:20:21AM +1000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
and people will for ever be defining newtype wrappers or complaining that the whole library isn't parametrised by the endianness or whatever. For existing formats you need much more flexibility and control. The Binary class is to make it really convenient to serialise Haskell types, and it's built on top of the layer that gives you full control.
We intend to work more on this other side of the library in the coming couple of months. If you could tell us a bit more about your use case, that'd be great.
I just want to read in a file full of Doubles (written in binary format from C++) and print out text (into a pipe or file to be read by gnuplot). It's not a high-performancs use (the file is only a megabyte or so), but it's something that *ought* to be easy, and so far as I can tell, it requires tricky hackery. I suppose I was just disappointed, because I'd figured that the Binary library was there to do what I wanted. :( It was something I could have done in five minutes (counting tuning the gnuplot file) in perl, and it's embarrassing (which makes it frustrating) to fail in Haskell to complete it in... I couldn't say how long, an hour or so? I know I could have used an Array, or used a Ptr and Storable, but this was supposed to be an easy safe scripting problem, and in my opinion neither of those qualify. -- David Roundy http://www.darcs.net