On Tue, 2007-10-23 at 16:34 +0200, Yitzchak Gale wrote: > Duncan Coutts wrote: > > I'm very happy to get feedback on the API, the documentation or of > > course any bug reports. > > It would be nice if the API could be the same for all > character and data codecs.
Hmm, though the inputs and outputs are different types in general. With compression we're working with uninterpreted streams of bytes. For character encoding/decoding we're converting between internal Unicode representations and external representations as sequences of bytes. That is, (de)compression does not fit into encode :: [Word8] -> String decode :: String -> [Word8] If we parametrise over the input and output types we get something far too general. Also, from my point of view there's nothing wrong with giving (de)compression a different function name from character encoding. In my opinion it is easier to read: content <- return . decode . decompress =<< readFile file than content <- return . decode . decode =<< readFile file Where I mean to read a compressed unicode text file. Names are good! :-) Am I missing something or just being curmudgeonly? :-) Duncan _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
