Hello, I am just going to summarize what we are proposing so far:
hGetByte :: Handle -> IO Word8 hPutByte :: Handle -> Word8 -> IO () I like the "byte" terminology even though it may not be absolutely accurate.
Simon suggested that these should only work on handles that are in binary mode, and that seems reasonable to me. Other people would like them to work on files open in text mode. I am not sure why we need that, text mode suggests that we want to think of the file as containing characters and not bytes (and should ideally support different character encodings etc). If a programmer needs to muck around with the raw bytes in a "text" file they can always implement that on top of the binary file interface. I also don't think that '\n' should flush buffers in binary mode --- I would like a binary file to simply contain bytes. I don't think that line buffering makes sense in that situation, but perhaps treating line buffering as block buffering is reasonable (i.e. lines are as big as the buffer). There was also a request for operations that get multiple bytes:
readBinaryFile :: FilePath -> IO [Word8] writeBinaryFile :: FilePat -> [Word8] -> IO ()
hGetBytes :: Handle -> Int -> IO (UArray Int Word8) hPutBytes :: Handle -> UArray Int Word8 -> IO () With the current interface we can kind of implemenet something like
I think something like that might be useful, but I would prefer if they were using handles, and arrays, e.g. something like: this using hGetArray, and unsafeFreeze, but it would be nicer to not have to use the unsafe freeze. The 'int' argument for the first function says how many bytes to read. Using these it seems easy to implement readBinaryFile and writeBinaryFile. -Iavor