On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 11:36:46AM +0200, Vincent Hanquez wrote:
On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 05:07:51AM -0400, Edward Kmett wrote:
Henning has a point.
EndianSensitive is arguably the more appropriate notion.
Yes, Bits is not necessarily the best fit in term of naming or feature, but nothing close to EndianSensitive is in base.
There's no reason that the recommended interface to the primitives needs to be in base. It would be a little unfriendly to only export the primitives, but we could just export byteSwap16 :: Word16 -> Word16 byteSwap32 :: Word32 -> Word32 byteSwap64 :: Word64 -> Word64 and leave it up to packages like data-endian to provide a more user-friendly interface. The problem with adding a Bytes class is there are various questions, like "should there be an instance Bytes a => Bytes [a]?", "should there be a toWord8s :: a -> [Word8]" method?", and "would Word8s be a better name for the class?". If the class goes into base, then it's a lot harder to change the answers to these questions (and, indeed, to the questions that we don't think to ask before the class is in a released GHC). I think that adding the functions above, probably to Data.Word, would be my preference. Oh, and for the record, I also prefer "byteSwap" to "bswap", and dislike using (Finite)Bits for this. Thanks Ian