Transmitting Haskell values

[Peter Simons]

Joachim Durchholz writes:

 > What sent me first into deep confusion is that I found all of
 > {Text,GHC}.{Read,Show} first, and the Read classes marked as
 > "nonportable GHC extensions".

Then you will surely love the Foreign.* hierarchy, most notably
Foreign.Storable. If you want to do binary I/O within "standard"
Haskell, this is the place to look at. I found [1] to be a pretty good
introduction to the subject.

Just for the sake of providing you with an alternative to read / show:
Take a look at HaXml [2]. This package provides means to read and
write Haskell data structures as XML files, what is about as platform
independent as you can get.

Peter


[1] http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/ffi/
[2] http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/HaXml/index.html