On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 10:20:21AM +1000, Duncan Coutts wrote: > and people will for ever be defining newtype wrappers or complaining > that the whole library isn't parametrised by the endianness or whatever. > For existing formats you need much more flexibility and control. The > Binary class is to make it really convenient to serialise Haskell types, > and it's built on top of the layer that gives you full control. > > We intend to work more on this other side of the library in the coming > couple of months. If you could tell us a bit more about your use case, > that'd be great.
I just want to read in a file full of Doubles (written in binary format from C++) and print out text (into a pipe or file to be read by gnuplot). It's not a high-performancs use (the file is only a megabyte or so), but it's something that *ought* to be easy, and so far as I can tell, it requires tricky hackery. I suppose I was just disappointed, because I'd figured that the Binary library was there to do what I wanted. :( It was something I could have done in five minutes (counting tuning the gnuplot file) in perl, and it's embarrassing (which makes it frustrating) to fail in Haskell to complete it in... I couldn't say how long, an hour or so? I know I could have used an Array, or used a Ptr and Storable, but this was supposed to be an easy safe scripting problem, and in my opinion neither of those qualify. -- David Roundy http://www.darcs.net _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe