[Haskell-cafe] Re: Bit Streams

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 11:00 AM, Adam Langley <agl at imperialviolet.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 10:52 AM, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
>> Would you recommend binary-strict over bitsyntax now?
>> Or are none yet entirely satisfactory
>
> Probably, yes. Bitsyntax was, after all, the first Haskell code I ever
> wrote :) It works, but I think the monad style of binary-strict is
> better.

If you provide Applicative and Alternative instances for your getter
monads (perhaps you already do?), that will get us very close to the
kind of notational succinctness that Erlang's bit-level pattern
matching gives, using entirely general Haskell mechanisms, and without
the fuglitude of TH. That, I think, would be just lovely.