System.IO.latin1 docs

[Ross Paterson]

On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 07:57:46PM +0100, Bas van Dijk wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 4:27 PM, Ross Paterson <ross at soi.city.ac.uk> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 04, 2011 at 04:03:34PM +0100, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> >> Simon Marlow schrieb:
> >> > Good plan.  I'll make a proposal to add System.IO.binary.  A different
> >> > type for binary handles is the right thing, but it's a larger
> >> > undertaking so I don't plan to attack it right now (someone else is
> >> > welcome to do so).
> >>
> >> Isn't this also the purpose of the safer-file-handles package?
> >>
> >> http://hackage.haskell.org/package/safer-file-handles
> >
> > No, that puts the IOMode and region in the type, not the binary mode.
> 
> Indeed. However, I would be glad to add such a safety feature if we
> can distill a nice API.
> 
> What would such an API look like?

My simplistic thought was to to make System.IO.Binary essentially a copy
of System.IO minus the text-only operations, with its own Handle type and
hClose, etc.  Apart from the name clashes, the issues I could see were:

- instead of setBinaryMode and setEncoding, you'd have operations to
  convert between the Handle types, with the extra requirement that the
  argument Handle not be used later.

- you'd probably need both binary and text versions of stdin, stdout and
  stderr, with a requirement that you only use one of them.