[Haskell-cafe] Binary constants in Haskell

[Dusan Kolar]

Hello all,

  // PLS, no flame

  I think the question was not whether there's a way, how to handle the 
problem of encryption of a binary number to anything suitable and, more 
or less, readable by a human and transforming it to a binary form, but 
whether there's such a literal or not and whether it is bad idea to have 
something like 0b10111011.

  From my point of view, the difference between 0b10111011 and 
(bin[1,0,1,1,1,0,1,1]) is 22-10 that is 12 characters. Moreover, 
allowing ADA features for all numeric literals we could have 0b1011_1011 
;-) where the type would be Num a => a, of course.

  So, i would expect only two answers: NO, it is .......,  or YES, in 
version 6.9.0 it is possible. ;-)

  Dusan


Ketil Malde wrote:
> Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> writes:
>
>   
>>> Are there binary constants in Haskell, as
>>> we have, for instance, 0o232 for octal and
>>> 0xD29A for hexadecimal?
>>>       
>
>   
>> No, though it is an interesting idea.
>>     
>
> Presumably it is less common since octal and hexadecimal are more
> compact and almost as easy to interpret as bit patterns?  Why would
> you want them?
>
>     Prelude> let bin = foldl...
>     Prelude> 0o232
>     154
>     Prelude> bin [0,1,0, 0,1,1, 0,1,0]
>     154
>     Prelude> 0xD29A
>     53914
>     Prelude> bin [1,1,0,1, 0,0,1,0, 1,0,0,1, 1,0,1,0]
>     53914
>
> -k
>   

-- 

 Dusan Kolar            tel: +420 54 114 1238
 UIFS FIT VUT Brno      fax: +420 54 114 1270
 Bozetechova 2       e-mail: kolar at fit.vutbr.cz
 Brno 612 66
 Czech Republic

--