I'm recently working on doing some atmospheric modelling for my PhD thesis work and I've been writing parallel implementations in Java, Ruby, and Haskell. I picked up Haskell as part of the LoTY project and was especially impressed by how expressive and clean the code is. I've been quite successful at writing most of my numerical libraries in Haskell (typically at a much reduced SLOC) but I'm not butting my head against binary data.
I have a large store of data, output by a Fortran model, which essentially consists of binary files containing arrays of floating point values. In doing some googling on reading binary data in Haskell I've come across some old (> 1 year) references to some mailing list discussions on reading binary data. So given the background I have a few questions:
1 - Is there yet a standard, or at least commonly supported by hugs and ghc, method for dealing with binary data.
2 - If not, is there a "standard" library that is used to manipulate binary data. I've seen some references to some implementations but given that this is being done in my limited spare time (I'm not a full time student) I'd rather not spin my wheels on something that's going to be dead in a matter of months.
3 - What is the current status of getting binary data into the Haskell standard?
I understand that I can write a C extension, but part of my interest in Haskell lies in the ability to write scientific software that very closely resembles the mathematics that are being modelled. On that note, I'd also be very interested in conversing with people that are doing physics modelling (atmospheric dynamics and chemistry is esp. interesting) using functional languages.
Thanks!
Gordon Miller [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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