this is just an idea, that came out from some discussion on #haskell. if one would want to use an external fast library for storing data (using FFI), one would need some sort of marshalling. this is inconvenient as to my knowledge one would have to add new code for each type, correct me if I'm wrong. one solution would be to add (just conceptually) toBinary :: a -> [Int] -- pack data as a string of bytes fromBinary :: [Int] -> a -- unpack binarySize :: a -> Maybe Int -- number of bytes for this type or Nothing if not fixed the packing would be compiler dependent since it is not of interest to read the content, just to get an easy way of marshalling arbitrary types. this might be low priority for now, just giving my input while still remembering it. /Johan Henriksson