[Haskell-cafe] bitSize

[Andrew Coppin]

>     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?
>
>
> I think that falls into the realm of protocol design; if you're doing it
> in your program at runtime, you're probably doing it wrong.  (The fixed
> size version makes sense for marshaling; it's *dynamic* sizes that need
> to be thought out beforehand.)

If you're doing, say, cryptography, then thousand-bit random integers 
that need to be serialised are fairly common...