well, it is your choice to think of it as you like, but this is not what my original mail was about. i think the ability to make data persistant is a useful one and it should be as transperant to the programmer as possible. when i write something like:

I, on the other hand, believe that the original tact - serialisation as in "Show" - is a useful, necessary thing, and something that should be available across Haskell implementations. It seems to me that the only thing that is preventing such a library, is agreement on the detail, as distinct from "persistence" of the form desired by iavor, where it appears some experimentation will be required. I am more than willing to document what appear to be the open issues and work through this mail list to gain a consensus on them, with the goal at hand: some document similar to the FFI addendum, provided, of course, there is some support for this. Michael Vorin _________________________________________________________________ MSN Instant Messenger now available on Australian mobile phones. Go to http://ninemsn.com.au/mobilecentral/hotmail_messenger.asp