This is getting a bit confusing.
* the content of the Haskell report itself is at least a
bit hallucinatory (in addition to being somewhat difficult to understand).
* It seems like each Haskell distribution has its own peculiarities and libraries
e.g. greencard, variable tuples, read/write binary, and other libs.
and various syntactic quirks (hence the hard to intepret #ifdef's I see in
the code I download). All of this leads to the question: how
hallucinatory is the library report?
* there is not a lot of available external documentation -- it is not like
I can go to my local Barnes and Noble and find a book on Haskell (or any
functional programming language except for Scheme and occasionally ML)
* It now seems that I should switch to NHC because it supports binary.
I have been developing in Hugs. What am I losing aside from
interpretation? NHC has no description at Haskell.org, it seems,
therefore, to be out of favor? (the URL at Haskell.org also does not
match the one sent by Malcolm Wallace)
To the newcomer who is not part of the FP academic community, this all
makes life sort of difficult. These differences seem larger than the
differences among C compilers and are MUCH larger than the differences
among Java compilers. I have been trying to learn Haskell and have been
impressed with both its elegance and the way it allows me to write code
that works on the first try (or two).
However, I am not a researcher. I do commercial software development and
need some documentation and stability. I understand that everything here
is fairly new, but it would be really usefl if someone would post a
summary of the FP community politics for those of us outside the research
community:
* What verions of Haskell should someone outside the research community be
using. e.g. is GHC ver x particularly experimental? Is Haskell as a
whole really a research language and not ready for commercial
(e.g. high intensity server based) applications?
* Any particular language features that we should avoid or that are
likely to change?
* Who "owns" haskell? How are decisions made about what goes in/out of
the language? Who controls the content of Haskell.org?
-Alex-
___________________________________________________________________
S. Alexander Jacobson i2x Media
1-212-697-0184 voice 1-212-697-1427 fax
On Fri, 1 May 1998, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
> Alex Jacobson writes:
>
> > 1. Generating GIFs
> > I need to create a CGI script that returns a GIF. The docs are somewhat
> > unclear about how to do this.
> >
> > All the IO operators seem to be about Chars and claim to be unicode.
> > If they are unicode, does that mean they read 2 bytes at a time of the
> > input stream?
> >
> > Is there a way to maintain the integrity of binary data?
>
> The York nhc13 compiler has a Binary library which will allow you to read
> and write arbitrary numbers of bits (up to 32 at a time) to/from files.
>
> putBits :: BinHandle -> Int -> Int -> IO (BinPtr a)
> getBits :: BinHandle -> Int -> IO Int
>
> The second argument of each function is the number of bits to transfer.
>
> By the way, in a discussion earlier this week between the implementors
> of ghc and of the nhc13 library, we agreed a new high-level interface
> to the Binary I/O stuff. Essentially the low-level functions such as
> 'getBits' will remain the same, but there will be a new layer of
> secure typed I/O on top. This means you can expect to see an
> implementation of Binary in ghc/Hugs at some point in the future, and
> likewise you can expect nhc13's Binary library to grow soon too.
>
> York nhc13 is currently available in beta-release from
> http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/nhc13/
> Please note that because parts of the Binary library are still in flux,
> and there may be small changes and additions from one beta release to
> the next. Having said that, the basic library functions are now pretty
> stable.
>
> Regards,
> Malcolm
>
