Keith Wansbrough
I agree with Ashley - surely we're not trying to write *new* libraries, we're just trying to better organise the existing ones.
1. not having a shared Image type or class at all (just types PNG, GIF, JPEG, etc)
I think that is a good choice, since otherwise you need to make some decisions that bring you into new-libraries territory. Conversion between formats would probably be useful, though, perhaps one could FFI to ImageMagick or something? ISTR the Amiga having a library called DataType or something. This would automatically convert data types from a library of conversion routines, so that if you wrote a program to read TIFFs, it could apply the appropriate routine to read BMPs as well. Or something like that. It seems to me that some of this functionality is the domain of a type system - can it e.g. be achieved with a generic 'fromImage' function? -kzm -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants