Am I the only one who finds this encoding-of-types in the _name_ of a
function quite distateful? There is no type safety being enforced here, no
ensuring one will not be encoding a Ptr one way and decoding it another. Why
not use Haskell's type system to help you there?
When marshalling data you often don't want any type safety. You often
want to explicitely linearize data from one type and then unlinearize it
into another type. The net result is that of casting. In fact, you can
write a marshalling library with an interface based entirely on this
concept:
http://www.lava.net/~newsham/x/Pkts5.lhs
The interface is, in essense, a glorified casting mechanism. To marshall
data you convert it to an array of bytes and to unmarshall data you
unconvert it.
Jacques
Tim Newsham
http://www.lava.net/~newsham/
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