[Admin's note: sorry for the delay of forwarding articles,
I've been away. -- David <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]
Malcolm Wallace wrote:
>Phil Trinder asked:
>
>> Do any Haskell implementations support Binary files?
>
>At York we have a version of nhc13 which supports, amongst other things,
>binary file I/O. We hope to release it to the world fairly soon.
>
>We have confirmed that binary files enable a faster data transfer rate
>than the textual parsing of ordinary files, as well as delivering
>considerable space savings. As with ordinary files, our implementation
>allows only data to be stored - functional values are somewhat tricky.
>Also, it is easy to lose sharing in the data structure when it is
>converted to the binary format - however we now have a means of
>avoiding that loss.
>
>More details will be available soon.
>
It's important to note that it's NOT ONLY FUNCTIONS that cause problems
with persistence and sharing. Any non-strictly evaluated value (and most
Haskell modules will contain many of these) will cause a problem because of
the implicit function embedded in its closure or its graph and there will
also be a big sharing problem.
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