[Haskell-beginners] Haskell Serialization

[Stephen Tetley]

Hi Ashish

Daniel has largely answered this for me (thanks Daniel!).

If you define Binary instances for your data types to match a protocol
- then as Daniel says you can only use them for that protocol.
Similarly the all the regular Haskell types - Int, Word8, Float, etc.
- have Binary instances ready-made which you may not want when dealing
with anything non-Haskell [*]: numbers are always big-endian, the
encodings for Integers, Floats and the like are sparsely documented
and may well handle signs differently to an equivalent C / Java / ...
representation.

[*] Personally I'd go as far as saying, as saying you should avoid
them entirely except for writing other instances of the Binary class.

Best wishes

Stephen