[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] installing streams library

[Tim Newsham]

> Am I the only one who finds this encoding-of-types in the _name_ of a 
> function quite distateful?  There is no type safety being enforced here, no 
> ensuring one will not be encoding a Ptr one way and decoding it another.  Why 
> not use Haskell's type system to help you there?

When marshalling data you often don't want any type safety.  You often 
want to explicitely linearize data from one type and then unlinearize it 
into another type.  The net result is that of casting.  In fact, you can 
write a marshalling library with an interface based entirely on this 
concept:

http://www.lava.net/~newsham/x/Pkts5.lhs

The interface is, in essense, a glorified casting mechanism.  To marshall 
data you convert it to an array of bytes and to unmarshall data you 
unconvert it.

> Jacques

Tim Newsham
http://www.lava.net/~newsham/