[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANN: A triple of new packages for talking tothe outside world

[David Roundy]

On Jan 9, 2008 10:10 AM, Dominic Steinitz
<dominic.steinitz at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts <at> worc.ox.ac.uk> writes:
> > The difficulty is in deciding what the api should be. Does it give you a
> > real bitstream or only a byte aligned one? If I ask for 3 bits then 15
> > bytes what does it do? Does it assume I meant 3 bits, then pad to the
> > next byte boundary and get 15 bytes, or does it mean get 15 bytes but at
> > this 3 bit shift offset?
>
> I'd suggest an aligned and unaligned api.
>
> So the aligned api would get 3 bits and the 15 bytes would start from the next
> byte boundary.
>
> The unaligned api would get 3 bits and the 15 bytes (=15 x 8 bits) would finish
> still with an offset of 3.

Do you mean we'd have an unalignedGetBytes as well as getBytes (which
would remain aligned)? That would make sense, but it would seem a bit
heavy to duplicate all of the binary API.

David