[Haskell-cafe] Data.Binary Endianness

Sven Panne sven.panne at aedion.de
Mon Sep 10 12:40:48 EDT 2007


On Monday 10 September 2007 18:21, Thomas Schilling wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-09-10 at 18:11 +0200, Sven Panne wrote:
> [...]
> > The library looks quite nice, but I'm missing support for reading/writing
> > Int{8,16,32,64}
>
> maybe this?
>
> http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/binary/0.3/doc/html/Data-Binary
>-Get.html#v%3AgetWord8

Of course I can *implement* everything on top of this, but this is not the 
point. The binary library should have builtin support for more data types, 
and this is probably not hard to implement.

> Also note that many Haskell standard types are instances of the Binary
> class.  I might have misunderstood what you're asking for, though...

Again a confusion of the 2 things the binary package offers (I was confused 
initially as well): The Binary class is totally useless for reading/writing 
existing formats, simply because that's not its task. To read/write an 
existing format (BMP, MP3, WAV, Quake BSP, etc.) you have to use the 
getFoo/readFoo functions. So what I was asking for is:

   getInt32be, putIEEEFloatLe, getIEEEDoubleHost, ...

Type classes might be used to get a slightly smaller API, but I am unsure 
about the performance impact and how much this would really buy us in terms 
of the ease of use of the API.

Cheers,
   S.


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