[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] Image manipulation

[Tim Chevalier]

[redirecting to haskell-cafe]
On 10/29/07, Brent Yorgey <byorgey at gmail.com> wrote:
> Haskell is a wonderful language, so I hate to say this...but personally I
> don't see the benefit of using Haskell here, unless the manipulations you
> want to do are very complex.  Some simple shell (or
> perl/python/ruby/whatever) scripts to glue together some calls to convert
> (or possibly other ImageMagick utilities) ought to do the job just fine.
>

If you're doing many image transformations, invoking an external
program like convert will get expensive due to context-switching. So
that's why something like the (not-yet-existent) bindings for
ImageMagick-as-a-library might be useful.

I agree that laziness probably isn't going to be helpful, but there
may be interesting things to be done that are enabled by purity and
higher-order-functions. I'm working on the ImageMagick bindings
because I'm curious to find out. There are obvious things like being
able to define compositions of transformations -- which is easy to do
when you're calling library functions in-memory, and less so if you're
using a separate executable -- but maybe there are more interesting
applications too.

Cheers,
Tim

-- 
Tim Chevalier * catamorphism.org * Often in error, never in doubt
"Thus spake the Master Programmer: When you have learned to snatch the
error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave."--J.
Geoffrey