[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell poker server

[Andre Pang]

On 31/08/2005, at 7:37 AM, Miles Sabin wrote:

> I've been using parsec for binary parsing (Java class files in my  
> case)
> as a first exercise with both Haskell and combinator parsing, with a
> view to applying same to network protocols.

I've also been experimenting with using Parsec to parse binary  
files.  The biggest problem with is that it's a slow, because you're  
working with types of [Char] rather than e.g. UArray Word8.  This is  
usually fine if you're doing on-the-fly processing or are working  
with small files, but in my case, I was working with 1GB+ video  
files.  Having over 1,000,000 list cells of one character each gets a  
tad slow :).

I did a little bit of work (with emphasis on 'little') to start  
refactoring Parsec so it can work with generic sequences instead of  
just lists (so you can make it work with arrays), but haven't gotten  
too far.  Having Parsec work speedily with binary files would  
absolutely rock -- I suspect there are a lot of people who've never  
thought about using parser combinators to process binary data, and if  
it's a feasible option ...


-- 
% Andre Pang : trust.in.love.to.save  <http://www.algorithm.com.au/>