Text I/O library proposal, first draft

[Hal Daume]

Hi Ben,

> Bad things:
>=20
>   * There's no way to implement fgetpos/fsetpos type functionality,
>     because coders don't expose their internal state. (In fact, there
>     would need to be a way to explicitly copy the state, since it may
>     well include IORefs, Ptrs, etc.) Is this a serious problem?

Yes!  This is an enormously serious problem.  At least for me.

It's not a problem for writing files, but I really really really need
this functionality when reading files.  Reason: I'm often tooling around
in very large (1gb or greater) files which happen to be sorted on some
sort of index and I need to do binary search in them.  To load all the
file into Haskell or to do linear search is impossible.

Other than that, I rather like the design.

 - Hal