[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANNOUNCE: binary: high performance, pure binary serialisation

[Tomasz Zielonka]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 03:12:29PM +0000, Dougal Stanton wrote:
> Quoth Arie Peterson, nevermore,
> > I also fear that the existing script does not handle types with more than
> > 256 constructors correctly. While uncommon, those are not unrealistic.
> 
> "256 constructors ought to be enough for anybody"? ;-)
> 
> Seriously though, the thought of a type definition that heavyweight
> quite terrifies me.

Think about simple enumerations, eg. for keywords in a programming
language:

    data Keyword = IF
                 | THEN
                 | ELSE
                 | BEGIN
                 | END
                 ...

http://www.cs.vu.nl/grammars/cobol/:
    Number of keywords: 420

Perhaps such examples could be treated differently, but I think it's
better to have a more general solution and not have to assume
unneccesary restrictions on user's datatypes.

> I would be interested to see if such a thing could be warranted and
> not more sensibly broken down into smaller (sets of) units.

I think in the above example the most sensible thing is to have all the
keywords in the same datatype.

Best regards
Tomasz