[Haskell-cafe] handling multiple versions of a data structure

[Dmitry V'yal]

Greetings,

while developing my neural net simulator I stumbled upon a problem.

I have a data type NeuralNet and use Show and Read instances for saving 
and loading configurations. As time passed, I changed the data type, so 
the program can no longer load files saved in previous versions.

I want fix it. My current idea looks as follows. I'm going to create a 
bunch of types NN1, NN2, NN3..NNn for different versions and write 
converters c12 :: N1 -> N2, c23 :: N2 -> N3 and so on.

But how to organize the whole process of parsing String into NNn so it's 
easy to change formats?
Something based on using a list of parsers
[read, c43 . read, c43 . c23 . read, c43, c23 . c12 . read, c43 . c32 . 
c21 . read]

looks rather verbose and grows quadratically with N.

I'm sure there must be a more elegant way. Any ideas?

Dmitry