On Sat, 27 Aug 2011 11:57:57 +0100, you wrote: >I meant if you're trying to *implement* serialisation. The Bits class >allows you to access bits one by one, but surely you'd want some way to >know how many bits you need to keep?
For fixed-size types (e.g., Int), I might use a simple byte-for-byte serialization. But these days, I tend to avoid binary serializations, and use string conversions for all types, taking advantage of whatever built-in conversions the language offers. There's obviously more overhead, but the advantages usually outweigh the disadvantages. For one thing, I can come back a couple of years later and still figure out what the data are supposed to be. >Likewise, you say the standard PRNG can be used to generate random >Integers, but what if you're trying to implement a new PRNG? I'm not aware of of any PRNGs that use variable-length types (and I would think that such a PRNG wouldn't be very efficient), so I'm still not sure that I understand the question. -Steve Schafer _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe