[Haskell-cafe] Writing binary files?

[Sven Panne]

Glynn Clements wrote:
> Which is unfortunate, because of the requirement to pass a Ptr. We
> really need "hPutBytes :: [Word8] -> IO ()" etc.

This is no real problem, see e.g. Abraham's recent mail. And having bulk
operations like hGetBuf/hPutBuf available is vitally important, a list
of bytes blows up the memory needs by about an order of magnitude and is
quite slow. What I'm really missing in addition to that is standard support
for "real world" representations of common data types.

> Also, changing the existing functions to deal with encodings is likely
> to break a lot of things (i.e. anything which reads or writes data
> which is in neither UTF-8 nor the locale-specified encoding).

Hmmm, the Unicode tables start with ISO-Latin-1, so what would exactly break
when we stipulate that the standard encoding for string I/O in Haskell is
ISO-Latin-1? Additional encodings could be specified e.g. via a new "open"
variant.

Cheers,
    S.