On 2/6/12 1:36 PM, Tyson Whitehead wrote:
Jumping in without having paid much attention to the thread or API, but I expect [Word8] (ByteString?) would fit the general case better than [Int32]
I'd second the vote for ByteString. If the goal is to dump a bunch of bits without declaring how many there are beforehand, then ByteString is exactly the right interface for that. If the goal is to serialize things efficiently, then ByteString is one of the better target representations for that[1]. I don't know what exactly StdGen is storing under the hood, but I don't imagine that it really has the semantic structure of a list of Int32. [1] Depending on the details of what all you need exactly, it may not be the best. For example, if the semantic interpretation of the bits is non-uniform, then you'll probably want an intermediate structure which expresses the non-uniform chunks; and from there you'll almost surely need to start worrying about things like versioning of the format etc. -- Live well, ~wren