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

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2007-01-30 at 09:38 +0000, Ross Paterson wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 09:52:01AM +1100, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> > ross:
> > > why do you need a Put monad, which always seems to have
> > > the argument type ()?  Monoids really are underappreciated.
> > 
> > For the syntax, and So that people can directly port their code from
> > NewBinary.  (The instances are basically unchanged).
> 
> And so the successor to binary must have the same interface, and so on
> forever.  The backward compatibility argument seems weak to me, leaving
> only the advantage of do-notation.
> 
> Monads are the new lists.

I was about to say that for the more complicated binary serialisation
formats (eg GHC's .hi format) people need monads with state, like string
pools etc, but actually now that I think about it, that can be done with
a monoid too.

Ross, you need to make a monoid transformer library (at least reader and
state) and campaign for ++ to be redefined as mappend, then everyone
will want to use it since it'll be so neat and convenient! :-)

Can anyone see a real serialisation use case that needs a monad for the
serialisation side? I'd thought I had an example, but I was wrong.


Duncan