[Haskell-cafe] bitSize

[Andrew Coppin]

On 26/08/2011 10:51 PM, Steve Schafer wrote:
> On Fri, 26 Aug 2011 20:30:02 +0100, you wrote:
>
>> You wouldn't want to know how many bits you need to store on disk to
>> reliably recreate the value?
>
> I can't say that I have cared about that sort of thing in a very long
> time. Bits are rather cheap these days. I store data on disk, and the
> space it occupies is whatever it is; I don't worry about it.

I meant if you're trying to *implement* serialisation. The Bits class 
allows you to access bits one by one, but surely you'd want some way to 
know how many bits you need to keep?

Likewise, you say the standard PRNG can be used to generate random 
Integers, but what if you're trying to implement a new PRNG?