hello, thanks for your replies. i browsed thrugh the discussion on the libraries list, but it mainly seems to discuss if one should use bits or bytes in the binary representation. not that this is not important (my personal preference is to be fast rather then small, within reason), but i was more interested in what these functions should do. unfortunately i couldn't quite figure that out from the discussion there. in particular, i was thinking that this dumping facility should preserve sharing and support cyclic data. as such, i don't think one can write it in Haskell, as presumbably sharing is not observable from within the language. this is why the "deriving" bit seems essential - the compiler can perform some magic. bye iavor Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
| (c) how do we derive instances of Binary?
If you guys can agree an interface that GHC, nhc and Hugs can all support, I'll gladly do the 'deriving' stuff to make 'deriving Binary' work for GHC. What's always inhibited me is that there isn't a single agreed interface.
For most users, having a library that works across all Haskell implementations and platforms is much more important than having the most efficient possible library. But (the possibility of an) efficient implementation has to be a goal, just not the only goal. If GHC can't use it directly for interface files, so be it.
Simon
-- ================================================== | Iavor S. Diatchki, Ph.D. student | | Department of Computer Science and Engineering | | School of OGI at OHSU | | http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~diatchki | ==================================================