There is actually NO way with haskell 98 to portably read and write binary files. and many libraries which provide this feature are inherently non portable, (they assume a Haskell Char = C char = byte) which is not necisarily the case. I wrote up a proposal for a binary file IO mechanism to be added as a 'blessed addendum' to the standard at best and as a commonly implmented extension (in hslibs) at least.. my original proposal messages to the list can be gotten from http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~john/computer/haskell/ although without the messages from others in the list they may seem out of context. -- -------------------------------------------------------------- John Meacham http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~john/ California Institute of Technology, Alum. john@foo.net --------------------------------------------------------------