I have no problems with marshalling/unmarshalling (and even with the
implicit casting going on). What I dislike is having a bunch of
functions which are "the same" but with different names, where the
difference boils down to enumerated types that end up being encoded in
the function name. Regardless of type safety.
Jacques
Tim Newsham wrote:
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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