21 May
2003
21 May
'03
11:48 a.m.
Do you have an application where being in the IO monad to do this stuff isn't possible, or is inconvenient? No. But it is inelegant, since IO is the *only* way the bit consumer has of preserving state. So if for example the target is a list of arrays and bytes, it would be necessary to hold the list inside an IORef or something similar.
You lost me here :). I can easily agree with "it is inelegant", but I think that as soon as you start talking about binary representations of data types, you have to give up some elegance. I don't understand your example of the bit consumer and IORefs though...could you explain it a bit more (no pun)?