[Haskell-cafe] Re: Fwd: Semantics of iteratees, enumerators, enumeratees?

[Daniel Fischer]

On Thursday 26 August 2010 09:33:30, Heinrich Apfelmus wrote:
> Daniel Fischer wrote:
> > John Lato wrote:
> >>> Heinrich Apfelmus wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Do you have an example where you want chunking instead of single
> >>> character access?
> >>
> >> I am unable to think of any examples where you want chunking for any
> >> reason other than efficiency.
> >
> > For many hashing or de/encryption algorithms, chunking is more natural
> > than single-character access.
>
> Even when the chunk lengths are unpredictable? After all, unlike with
> fread  in C, you can't request the next chunk to have a certain length
> with Iteratees.
>

Well, I just gave an example where one would want chunking for reasons 
other than performance. That iteratees don't provide the desired 
functionality is a different matter.
For performance reasons, one would still be likely to want the I/O to 
happen in larger chunks than the processing, so it's kind of moot.

Cheers,
Daniel