[Haskell-cafe] Re: Hugs vs GHC (again) was: Re: Some randomnewbiequestions

[Ketil Malde]

Okay, I've taken a look (there seems to be some differences between
the web page and the tgz from the wiki - fileGet seems to have
disappeared).  I still don't grok much of it, so just ignore me if I'm
being overly naive.

Anyway.  Let's see, I can now open a stream from a file by doing:

     f <- openFileInputStream "filename"

streamGet f now gets me the bytes in that file.

Adding an encoding:
     t <- textInputStream f utf8

tsGet t gets me Chars as decoded by the utf8 decoder.  Cool.

Couldn't this be generalized more?  What about a fundep on the Stream
classes, parametrizing by content?  Ideally, I would like to have
'get' return a value of a type appropriate to the stream type.

I must admit I didn't dig too deeply in the gritty details of applying
codecs, but must textInputStream be limited to text-decoding
functions?  It would be really nice to be able to specify arbitrary
decoders (e.g. using 't <- Stream.decode f utf8') to do stuff like

         t <- decode f zip
         p <- decode f (crypt "password")

So it seems to me that this can be generalized to more than Text, but
the implementation is perhaps too text-specific?

BTW and IMHO, perhaps the parameters could be swapped -
i.e. 'map (textInputStream utf8) f1 f2 f3' seems to me to be more
useful than 'map (textInputStream  f) utf8 iso8859_1 ucs4' :-)

-kzm
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants