Proposal for a new I/O library design

[Sven Panne]

Tim Sweeney wrote:
> I live in a different universe, but over here I prefer to represent files
> purely as memory-mapped objects.  [...]

I'd prefer "official" support for this in Haskell, too. The need for this
and other I/O-related stuff was recognized by the Java community, too: It
resulted in the java.nio package family, see e.g.

    http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/

I suggest we should have a look at this before re-inventing the wheel. Not
that all Java libraries are perfect in their first incarnation, far from it,
see e.g. java.awt, java.net.URL, java.io, ...  :-P  But the second try
(javax.swing, java.net.URI, java.nio, ...) is often quite usable, so we can
probably learn some useful concepts from the latter.

Cheers,
    S.