Ashley Yakeley
Was there any kind of consensus emerging on this?
I think we agreed, more or less, on low-level Word8-based IO, and Char based functions on top of this doing encoding/decoding. (Possibly implementing Char functions natively for speed, but I suggest delaying that until it becomes a problem)
Leaving aside what might be done with the Char-based functions (and people seem to think they're fine as is)
Well, clearly, they need to be able to incorporate the encodings people are going to use. Just stuffing in Word8's works fine for now, but we should probably reimplement in terms of Word8 IO, and after that, wrap at least an UTF-8 coder. (I occasionally need something to translate UTF-8 mail to ISO-8859-1, this sounds like a simple way to get a feel for Unicode IO, and is probably a good alternative to upgrading Gnus :-)
I'd like to suggest the following:
* System.IO: addition of new Word8-based functions
hGetOctet :: Handle -> IO Word8 hLookAheadOctet :: Handle -> IO Word8 hPutOctet :: Handle -> Word8 -> IO () hPutArray :: Handle -> [Word8] -> IO () hLazyGetArray :: Handle -> IO [Word8]
...as per hGetChar, hLookAhead, hPutChar, hPutStr and hGetContents.
I've no critique of the actual functions, this seems pretty straightforward. I don't particularly like 'octet' (probably because I find it a bit pedantic, and it reminds me too much of committee decisions), and would prefer hGetWord8 or even hGetByte/hGetWord. Also, I find 'Array' a bit uncomfortable -- it's a list, isn't it? But why not simply: hPutOctet (or Word, Word8, Byte) :: Handle -> Word8 -> IO () hPutOctets (hPutWords, Bytes) :: Handle -> [Word8] -> IO () and hGetOctet :: Handle -> IO Word8 hGetOctets :: Handle -> IO [Word8] -- hGetContents-alike (I'd rather annotate the strict versions, lazy is usually the default) I'd also like a 'readFile'-like function for octets, I find my programs do a lot of their IO by lazily reading files, and being able to bury all the handle-stuff is a good thing, IMHO.
hGetArrayBlock :: Handle -> Int -> IO [Word8] hGetArrayReady :: Handle -> Int -> IO [Word8]
(Do these represent anything from Char IO? It seems the latter is intended for things like sockets, but (and here I display my ignorance even more than usual) can a Handle really represent a socket?)
* Network.Socket
The send & receive functions don't do any kind of character interpretation do they? I suggest these functions be given new types (and probably new names, as I suppose we'll need the old ones for compatibility):
I like the names, as they are taken more or less directly from the C libraries. I agree they shouldn't do any translation, though, so if the names have to go, so be it. -kzm -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants