binary files in haskell

[Manuel M. T. Chakravarty]

Simon Marlow <simonmar@microsoft.com> wrote,

> Olaf wrote,
> > Simon Marlow wrote,
> > > How about this slightly more general interface, which works 
> > with the new
> > > FFI libraries, and is trivial to implement on top of the 
> > primitives in
> > > GHC's IOExts:
> > > 
> > >         hPut :: Storable a => Handle -> a -> IO ()
> > >         hGet :: Storable a => Handle -> IO a
> > 
> > What about endianess? In which format are Floats or even just Bools
> > stored? For a file which probably shall be read from 
> > different machines
> > this is not clear at all.

Like in any other language, too.  If you are writing binary
data, you get all the problems of writing binary data.  I
agree that on top of that it would be nice to have some
really nice serilisation routines, but that should be a
second step.

> Overloading with Storable gives you more flexibility, since if you have
> a way to serialise an object in memory for passing to a foreign
> function, you also have a way to store it in binary format in a file
> (modulo problems with pointers, of course).

Yep, good idea.

Cheers,
Manuel