Persistant (as in on disk) data

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

|   (c) how do we derive instances of Binary?

If you guys can agree an interface that GHC, nhc and Hugs can all
support, I'll gladly do the 'deriving' stuff to make 'deriving Binary'
work for GHC.  What's always inhibited me is that there isn't a single
agreed interface.

For most users, having a library that works across all Haskell
implementations and platforms is much more important than having the
most efficient possible library. But (the possibility of an) efficient
implementation has to be a goal, just not the only goal.  If GHC can't
use it directly for interface files, so be it.

Simon