[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: binary: high performance, pure binary serialisation

[Tomasz Zielonka]

On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 10:22:58AM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> I was about to say that for the more complicated binary serialisation
> formats (eg GHC's .hi format) people need monads with state, like string
> pools etc, but actually now that I think about it, that can be done with
> a monoid too.
> 
> Ross, you need to make a monoid transformer library (at least reader and
> state) and campaign for ++ to be redefined as mappend, then everyone
> will want to use it since it'll be so neat and convenient! :-)
> 
> Can anyone see a real serialisation use case that needs a monad for the
> serialisation side? I'd thought I had an example, but I was wrong.

If you really want a monad, you can put the monoid into the writer monad
- and that's exactly what is done in Data.Binary! However, for someone
who prefers the monadic interface, wrapping in the writer monad every
time and additional boilerplate code (tell) can be a nuisance.

Best regards
Tomasz