[Haskell-cafe] Binary serialization, was Re: Abstraction leak

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

p.f.moore:
> On 05/07/07, Jonathan Cast <jcast at ou.edu> wrote:
> >Can't say I agree.  I've been learning Python, and have been very 
> >un-impressed
> >so far with its library coverage, which I would rate no better than (in 
> >terms
> >of the POSIX bindings, worse than) Haskell.
> 
> It probably depends on your perspective. I've found lots of tasks that
> would be a simple library call in Python, but which require me to
> write the code myself in Haskell. Examples:
> 
> * Send an email

Sounds like a job for MissingH?

> * Parse an ini file

Probably have to write your own Parsec-based parser here.

> * Gzip compress a data stream

We have a wonderful library for this!

    http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/zlib-0.3

> * Calculate the MD5 checksum of a file

In the Crypto library, or use the openssl binding posted a couple of
days ago:

   http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/24165/focus=24170 

> 
> (Of course, I may just not have found the relevant library - that says
> something about discoverability rather than coverage, I guess).


Find more libraries on hackage:

    http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg-list.html

> For bindings, Python's Windows bindings (pywin32) are superb, where
> Haskell's are minimal and unmaintained. Of course, that won't matter
> to you if you use POSIX...
> 
> >The one thing off the top of my head that Python had was Base64, but 
> >that's 20
> >lines of Haskell tops.  Aside from that, nothing.
> 
> But that's 20 lines of code I don't want to write, and more, I don't
> know how to write (without looking up the definition of Base64).
> Having lots of these seemingly trivial helpers available "out of the
> box" is what library coverage means to me. (And Python does have lots
> of these - I don't know how Haskell fares in practice).
> 
> I'm not trying to start (or fan) a flamewar, but it's interesting how
> different people's perspectives on libraries can be...

-- Don