[Haskell-cafe] Just for a laugh...

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

andrewcoppin:
> Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> >See also the older NewBinary, 
> >    http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/NewBinary-0.1
> >  
> 
> Now that's just ironic...
> 
> 
> Incidentally, I've been thinking. You *might* want the binary 
> representation of things if you were going to, say, compress or encrypt 
> data before putting it into a file or whatever. Actually in Java 
> (bleeeh) you can wrap things around a stream so that data gets 
> compressed and transformed between where the program writes it, and 
> where it hits the endpoint. Haskell doesn't have a library for this, and 
> I don't immediately see how to implement one. It would be darn useful to 
> have a standard setup for this though. That way, when somebody wants to 
> implement a new way to do zlib compression or a SHA-256 implementation 
> or... there will already be a standardised way to access the binary 
> representation of data without having to write it to a file.
> 
> (If any of that made sense...)?)

Our zlib and bzlib2 bindings operate on in-memory lazy bytestrings. 
They thus provide:

    compress :: ByteString -> ByteString

and its inverse. So you can chain them with decoding:


    writeFile "foo.gz" . compress . encode $ myvalue

-- Don