On 29/08/2011 09:00 AM, Brandon Allbery wrote:
On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 03:40, Andrew Coppin
<andrewcop...@btinternet.com <mailto:andrewcop...@btinternet.com>> wrote:
I meant if you're trying to *implement* serialisation. The Bits
class allows you to access bits one by one, but surely you'd
want
some way to know how many bits you need to keep?
I think that falls into the realm of protocol design; if you're
doing it
in your program at runtime, you're probably doing it wrong.
(The fixed
size version makes sense for marshaling; it's *dynamic* sizes
that need
to be thought out beforehand.)
If you're doing, say, cryptography, then thousand-bit random
integers that need to be serialised are fairly common...
Sure, and there are encodings that let you do this without needing
bitSize (BER). You need a word count, but that's usually part of the
structure holding the integer.
OK. But since there's no way of getting a byte count for an Integer
either...
_______________________________________________
Haskell-Cafe mailing list
Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org
http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe