Re: System.IO.latin1 docs

On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 07:57:46PM +0100, Bas van Dijk wrote:

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Ross Paterson wrote:

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On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 04:03:34PM +0100, Henning Thielemann wrote:

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Simon Marlow schrieb:

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Good plan.  I'll make a proposal to add System.IO.binary.  A different type for binary handles is the right thing, but it's a larger undertaking so I don't plan to attack it right now (someone else is welcome to do so).

Isn't this also the purpose of the safer-file-handles package?

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/safer-file-handles

No, that puts the IOMode and region in the type, not the binary mode.

Indeed. However, I would be glad to add such a safety feature if we can distill a nice API.

What would such an API look like?

My simplistic thought was to to make System.IO.Binary essentially a copy of System.IO minus the text-only operations, with its own Handle type and hClose, etc. Apart from the name clashes, the issues I could see were: - instead of setBinaryMode and setEncoding, you'd have operations to convert between the Handle types, with the extra requirement that the argument Handle not be used later. - you'd probably need both binary and text versions of stdin, stdout and stderr, with a requirement that you only use one of them.