You definitely need to get to the octets when implementing communications protocols. Does this mean that if I send or receive certain octets or sequences of octets these will be converted into something else? Dominic.

2. A file is not made of "Char"s. A file is made of octets ("bytes"), i.e. Word8s. What is a "Char" anyway? Sometimes it's a seven- or eight-bit quantity with a _vague_ implication of interpretation as textual character; sometimes it's a 16-, 20.087- or 31-bit quantity with a much stronger implication of interpretation as textual character (strictly, Unicode "codepoint"). Is an ASCII 'r' the same as an EBCDIC 'r'? Or is an ASCII code 57 the same as an EBCDIC code 57?

As for streams, mostly they are streams of octets. But of course streams of anything might be useful.

There's an implicit conversion step, between whatever is the on-disk encoding of character streams and Unicode. GHC currently only supports a straightforward ISO 8851 encoding. I agree there ought to be a way to get at the raw bytes too. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 21st century air travel http://www.britishairways.com