Okay, I've taken a look (there seems to be some differences between the web page and the tgz from the wiki - fileGet seems to have disappeared). I still don't grok much of it, so just ignore me if I'm being overly naive. Anyway. Let's see, I can now open a stream from a file by doing: f <- openFileInputStream "filename" streamGet f now gets me the bytes in that file. Adding an encoding: t <- textInputStream f utf8 tsGet t gets me Chars as decoded by the utf8 decoder. Cool. Couldn't this be generalized more? What about a fundep on the Stream classes, parametrizing by content? Ideally, I would like to have 'get' return a value of a type appropriate to the stream type. I must admit I didn't dig too deeply in the gritty details of applying codecs, but must textInputStream be limited to text-decoding functions? It would be really nice to be able to specify arbitrary decoders (e.g. using 't <- Stream.decode f utf8') to do stuff like t <- decode f zip p <- decode f (crypt "password") So it seems to me that this can be generalized to more than Text, but the implementation is perhaps too text-specific? BTW and IMHO, perhaps the parameters could be swapped - i.e. 'map (textInputStream utf8) f1 f2 f3' seems to me to be more useful than 'map (textInputStream f) utf8 iso8859_1 ucs4' :-) -kzm -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants