Hello, I just wanted to chime in with a 'me too' in regards to this whole thread. Many of the programs I want to write involve reading and writing binary file formats, and writing the code to actually do that tends to be the ugliest, most error prone, boring part of the whole program. I have not thought to hard about the problem yet, but it seems like in addition to having low-level support for reading binary structures, it might be nice to have some sort of high-level syntax that could be used to autogenerate helper functions. It would be nice if I could write in some sort of syntax, what the binary file format looked like. Then something would read the format description, and generate a bunch of useful functions. For example, maybe it would generate a function that parses a binary file into an algebraic data structure, a function to validates an algebraic data structure, and function that writes the structure back out. I think, actually, that this could be done via template haskell. (Maybe someone has even done this already...) In any case, its just a daydream right now as I don't have time to even think about designing something. :) Jeremy Shaw. At Tue, 27 Jan 2004 19:43:48 -0000, Dominic Steinitz wrote:

I looked at the Erlang syntax when I wrote my helper functions and I agree it is very nifty. I didn't have the time to investigate how to do it in Haskell but it would be disappointing if it (or something like it) couldn't be done.

Dominic.

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Mikael,

Thanks, that's very helpful and seems to be just the sort of thing I'm looking for.

Greg

On Jan 26, 2004, at 6:05 PM, Mikael Brockman wrote:

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You'll probably want to take a look at Erlang's so called ``bit syntax'' at http://www.erlang.se/euc/00/bit_syntax.html. It's very nifty, and I'd love to see it (or something equally convenient) as a Haskell extension.

Hugs and kisses, Mikael Brockman

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