Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
(All of the above speaks of the 'high-level' Data.Binary not the
'low-level'.)
Data.Binary *is* the low-level Data.Binary :-)
I was distinguishing between these two levels:
(1) High-level = Binary typeclass. Contains instances for many, many
useful common types, the internals of which you don't need to understand
to use them. But then you wont' understand the format used. Which
doesn't matter if all you want to do is pipe stuff around.
(2) Low-level = Get and Put typeclasses. Allow you to shovel bytes as
you wish, including bundling them up into words of various sizes with
explicit endian-ness control. You can sensibly use this to define file
formats precisely with some reasonable expectation of speed. You could
for example write a TIFF reader (and writer [*]) using these primitives.
Jules
[*] - exercise for the reader: Can you write a TIFF reader and writer
simultaneously, in the sense that you define the file format once and
get Get and Put instances for free?
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