Binary mode I/O

[Andre Blavier]

The Haskell Report says: "Binary mode I/O ensures transparency *within*
an implementation".

I find that this limits considerably its usage.  Can't the Bin representations
of Char, Int, Float and Double (and maybe more) be standardized?

Ideally, I would like these datatypes to be represented on Bin streams as C
does (e.g., using fwrite and fread).  This would allow to easily read many
kinds of files not created by Haskell.

--Andre