Thinking about what's missing in our library coverage

[Don Stewart]

Following Simon M's advice, I look over the typical "batteries"
categories, using Python as input:

    http://docs.python.org/library/index.html

The following things were missing from the current Platform. There are many.
How would you identify the top, say, 5 libs to add?

-- Don


    * String support
          o binary formatting [binary] — lazy binary parsing/serialising
          o pcre regexes [pcre-light] [regex-pcre] — what’s our best regex lib?
          o unicode text [text] [text-icu] — packed, unicode text
          o codecs/encodings — encodings?
    * Data types
          o higher dimensional arrays [hmatrix]
          o bloomfilter — bloomfilters
          o bytestring-tries — IntMap for ByteStrings
          o dlist — difference lists
          o numbers — expanded number types
    * text
          o attoparsec (simple, bytestring parsing)
          o polyparse
          o csv parsing
          o pandoc — markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, Docbook, OpenDocument, ODT, RTF, MediaWiki, groff
    * math and numerics
          o blas — BLAS
          o cmath — C math functions
          o dimensional — physical dimensions
          o fftw
          o mersenne-random — fast randoms
    * persistance
          o anydbm?
          o sqlite3
          o hdbc
    * compression
          o bzip2
          o zip
          o tar
    * file formats
          o csv
          o config parser
    * crypto
          o hmac, md5, sha, hashing
    * systems
          o getopt
          o logging
          o termio
          o editline
          o mmap
    * Internet
          o network-bytestring
          o ssl
          o json
          o feed (rss, atom)
          o mime
          o base64 et al
          o uuencode
          o cgi
          o fastcgi
          o urls
          o ftp, http, imap, smtp clients
          o uuid
          o url parsing
          o http server
          o xml-rpc
    * Multimedia
          o colour
    * Internationalization
          o gettext
          o locale
          o i18n
    * GUIs
          o gtk2hs
    * Development
          o hscolour