Applicative functor for building C structs with Storable

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sat, 2007-10-13 at 18:25 +0200, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> Are there analogons to ByteString's Put and Get Monads to construct and 
> disect binary data in a C struct for exchange with a C program?

It's certainly possible. As John Meacham says on most platforms there is
a standard ABI (ie standard on that platform, not standard between
platforms).

So one could make a lib on top of Data.Binary.Get/Put that embeds the
knowledge about some particular platform's C struct ABI and allows
reading/writing them. Like, Data.Binary's Get/Put it could be used just
via the Applicative combinators.

You could probably also get a good deal of code re-use between different
platform ABIs by parametrising by things like alignment, endianness,
size of primitives etc.

Duncan