So I think what you want is a simple serialisation that can be read easily by a program *any* language, not just Haskell. That is, you want to nail down the exact byte sequence generated; that keeps you independent of minor variations in (say) the binary library. For that, s-expressions might do fine ... but the derived 'Show' would also be just fine, and has the merit of being an existing standardised format. If you are worried about parsing performance, that worry would probably apply equally to s-exps -- you can hand-write Read if you want.
It would make sense to use deriving(Show), and use a new class (or simply function) for the current prettified syntax. I don't think anyone would object to such a change. S | -----Original Message----- | From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Neil Mitchell | Sent: 13 June 2007 18:56 | To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Cc: Simon Marlow; [email protected]; Matthew Naylor | Subject: Re: External Core in binary format | | Hi | | > I'm not sure | > offhand why just doing Read/Show wouldn't work or didn't occur to us; | > is there a reason why that wouldn't be straightforward? | | Talking to Matt, the only thing is that currently Show is used for the | pretty printed version. Adding a new Ppr class and using that | shouldn't be that hard, then you can add the standard deriving | Read/Show. Read has rather bad performance, but the advantage of | immediately available and very little work might outweigh that. | | > > The other question is whether there will be a small standalone library | > > called "GHC.Core" which lets a user load an abstract syntax tree out | > > of a file? | > | > I think there should be, but AFAIK there's nothing in that direction yet. | | If you do go down the Read/Show route then a copy of whatever file | defines the data type in a standalone library would be all that's | needed - possibly with the pretty printer, but that's not essential | for people who just want to consume Core. | | Thanks | | Neil | | _______________________________________________ | Cvs-ghc mailing list | [email protected] | http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/cvs-ghc _______________________________________________ Cvs-ghc mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/cvs-ghc
