One rather funky but effective solution might be to use the tftp protocol. No security, but simple, flexible and efficient. I think there are C libraries that implement it. This would take care of handshaking binary data. I have no idea if anyone has ever used it in Haskell. GB On Wed, 2008-01-30 at 12:50 -0500, haskell-cafe-request@haskell.org wrote:

robably not all of them, but some of them, definitely.

If you want to transmit an arbitrary bytestring then I'm pretty sure that transmitting a length word first is the way to go. An arbitrary bytestring can have any value in it, so there are no values left to act as delimiters :) You'd have to have some kind of escaping mechanism, like show, which is expensive. -- "Isn't it funny how the Global Village includes everybody but the villagers?" (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Publications)