[Haskell-cafe] Data.Binary Endianness

[Ketil Malde]

On Tue, 2007-09-11 at 09:10 +0200, Sven Panne wrote:
> foo :: Binary a => ... -> a -> ..."? This should probably mean "foo is
> using some portable (de-)serialization, but doesn't care about the
> actual representation", 

I'm probably missing something, but:

How can the format be portable if the representation isn't unambigously
defined?  And if it is unabmigously defined, what's wrong with using it
for externally defined data formats?

-k