[Haskell-cafe] Re: Bit Streams

[Don Stewart]

agl:
> On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 12:46 AM, Dominic Steinitz
> <dominic.steinitz at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> > OK, so today I tried to write my first program using the Binary library.
> > And I've hit a snag: It appears the library will only handle data that
> > is byte-aligned. So if I try to write three Bool values, it uses three
> > bytes, not three bits.
> 
> There's a BitGet[1] and BitPut in the Hackage version of
> binary-strict. However, these versions work on strict ByteStrings.
> Putting, for one, is pretty inefficient. In the darcs version[2] of
> binary-strict, there's a fully lazy BitPut[3].
> 
> There was a request for a lazy BitGet, but I never wrote it. Most of
> the time, bit fields are small and you can use the lazy Get from
> binary to extract a ByteString and parse that with strict BitGet.
> However, the BitPut should be just fine (including doing things like
> writing ByteStrings by shifting each byte etc).
> 
> If it's missing anything obvious, ping me and I'll see what I can do.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> 
> [1] http://darcs.imperialviolet.org/darcsweb.cgi?r=binary-strict;a=headblob;f=/src/Data/Binary/Strict/BitGet.hs
> [2] http://darcs.imperialviolet.org/binary-strict/
> [3] http://darcs.imperialviolet.org/darcsweb.cgi?r=binary-strict;a=headblob;f=/src/Data/Binary/BitPut.hs

Adam,

Would you recommend binary-strict over bitsyntax now?
Or are none yet entirely satisfactory

-- Don