[Haskell-cafe] Seeking comments on this IO proposal

[David Roundy]

On Fri, Dec 17, 2004 at 12:09:34AM +0000, Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:
> Given this background you can probably guess that I'm not too keen on 
> the traditional open/read/write/seek/close model; I don't think it's a 
> good abstraction for anything, even files. I love the idea of gzip and 
> gunzip as transformations on streams, though, and streams backed by 
> memory buffers appear in my proposal too.

The traditional model may be limited, but it's still sufficient for many
purposes, and since it's what is supported by the OS, there's something to
be said for using it.  As a non-library-developer, I must admit that I
thought the proposal was pretty nice-looking.

In general, I like the idea of creating a standard interface having
multiple back ends, and certainly don't see how (for example) viewing a
String as a non-seekable read-only file would be at all a bad interface.
Of course, you could view it as a seekable read-only file, if you were
willing to give up the guarantee of memory-efficient lazy consumption of
said string.

Presumably you'd need separate classes for binary vs text streams? Since
hGetBuf certainly couldn't be used on a String, since it has no binary
representation...
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net