[mercury-users] Re: Sockets

[Fergus Henderson]

On 16-Jul-1998, Tom Howland <howland at tc.pw.com> wrote:
> One of the things it did wrong is it rolled up too much functionality in
> one package. There should have been a bare-bones interface to sockets, a
> package relating to time manipulation, another for binary representation
> of terms, and another for scheduling.

For what it is worth, the Mercury standard library already has
an interface for binary representation of terms: 
the relevant predicates are io__read_binary and io__write_binary.

(The current implementation of these actually uses a binary
representation that happens to also be a human-readable text
representation, but it will be easy to change this to a more
compact one if/when efficiency becomes important.)

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.