On Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 6:57 PM, Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de> wrote:
> Maybe ideal would be a format string based interface that calls C with
> a format string and a record of values. Because what I really need is
> to read/write records in an architecture independend way. Something
> like
>
> type t = { x:int; y:char; z:int64 }
> let t_format = "%2u%c%8d"
>
> put_formated buf t_format t
>
> But how to get that type safe? Maybe a camlp4 module that generates
> the format string and type from a single declaration so they always
> match.

It's possibly off-topic, but you might be interested in Richard
Jones's Bitstring project [1] wich deals with similar issues quite
nicely in my opinion.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/bitstring/