[Haskell-cafe] question about Data.Binary and Double instance

David Roundy droundy at darcs.net
Thu Apr 19 00:12:30 EDT 2007


On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 10:20:21AM +1000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> and people will for ever be defining newtype wrappers or complaining
> that the whole library isn't parametrised by the endianness or whatever.
> For existing formats you need much more flexibility and control. The
> Binary class is to make it really convenient to serialise Haskell types,
> and it's built on top of the layer that gives you full control.
>
> We intend to work more on this other side of the library in the coming
> couple of months. If you could tell us a bit more about your use case,
> that'd be great.

I just want to read in a file full of Doubles (written in binary format
from C++) and print out text (into a pipe or file to be read by gnuplot).
It's not a high-performancs use (the file is only a megabyte or so), but
it's something that *ought* to be easy, and so far as I can tell, it
requires tricky hackery.

I suppose I was just disappointed, because I'd figured that the Binary
library was there to do what I wanted.  :( It was something I could have
done in five minutes (counting tuning the gnuplot file) in perl, and it's
embarrassing (which makes it frustrating) to fail in Haskell to complete it
in... I couldn't say how long, an hour or so?

I know I could have used an Array, or used a Ptr and Storable, but this was
supposed to be an easy safe scripting problem, and in my opinion neither of
those qualify.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net


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