[Haskell-cafe] newbie questions (read, etc., with Data.ByteString.Lazy.Char8)

[Don Stewart]

dagit:
>    As the top search result.
> 
>    This means that you can convert any list of maybes into a list of what you
>    want.  It just tosses out the Nothings.
> 
>      2.  Why doesn't ByteString implement 'read'?  Is it just that this
>      function (like 'input' in Python) isn't really very useful for real
>      programs?
> 
>    I think probably for things more complex than parsing ints it's best to
>    make your own parser?  I seem to recall that someone was working on a
>    library of parsing functions based on bytestring?  Maybe someone else can
>    comment?
> 
>      3.  Why doesn't ByteString implement 'readDouble', etc.?  That is, why
>      are Int and Integer treated specially?  Do I not need readDouble?
> 
>    I think readInt was mostly implemented because integer reading was needed
>    a lot for benchmarks and programming challenge sites and people noticed it
>    was way slower than needed so someone put in the effort it optimize it. 
>    Once it was optimized, that must have satisfied the need for fast number
>    reading.

There's readInt, readInteger and readDouble now, as primitives, because
people ask for them.
  
>    I would agree that at least for Prelude types it would be nice to have
>    efficient bytestring based parsers.  Do we have Read/Show classes
>    specifically for working in bytestrings?  Maybe that's what the world
>    needs in the bytestring api.  Then again, I'm not really qualified to
>    comment :)  For all I know it already exists.
> 

Data.Binary is the generic parser for bytestrings. A higher level one
for parsing text (e.g. atto-parsec), might be worthwhile.

-- Don