ANN: network-alt 0.3 and hsgnutls 0.2.1

[Ashley Yakeley]

In article <20051106102654.GA4531 at yui.aoinet>,
 Einar Karttunen <ekarttun at cs.helsinki.fi> wrote:

> On 05.11 18:29, Ashley Yakeley wrote:
> > It's quite low-level, isn't it? I wonder if it would be worth doing 
> > something along these lines:
> > 
> > newtype IPv4Address = IPv4Address Word32
> > newtype IPv6Address = IPv6Address Word128
> 
> This brings the question on whether they would be native or
> big endian -

This should be unambiguous. For instance, in the address 127.0.0.1, 127 
is the high Word8 of the Word32.

> and the user would still need to use resolver API to get at these.

That could be a function in InternetService:

  type DomainName = String
  data InternetService addr  = MkInternetService {
    ...
    dnsLookup :: DomainName -> IO (Maybe addr), -- or similar
    ...
  }

> Does it make sense to have the address type in there?
> Most of the time high level applications should not
> care whether the socket is IPv4 or IPv6 (or something
> entirely else). One of my main goals has been to
> make the protocols transparent - changing from IPv4
> to being protocol agnostic should be as easy as possible.

This is a good application for polymorphism on the address type.

> The API you are suggesting would be certainly quite
> easy to implement on top of the current one. If you
> can specify the interface you would like I think
> I can include something like that in the next release...

What you have is close to the C sockets API. It's probably best not to 
mix the high-level and low-level stuff. Probably there should be some 
wider discussion on what the best approach is, especially as there's 
some impetus for reform of the file APIs also.

-- 
Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA