On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 04:56:02PM -0500, Mark Carroll wrote: > (shifting to Haskell-Cafe) > > On Fri, 28 Nov 2003, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote: > > > ajb: > (snip) > > > As a matter of pure speculation, how big an impact would it have if, in > > > the next "version" of Haskell, Strings were represented as opaque types > > > with appropriate functions to convert to and from [Char]? Would there be > > > rioting in the streets? > > I'd be sad to lose some convenient list-based string type because I make a > lot of use of the fact that strings are lists in processing them.
I agree. What I think might be a nice compromise at some point would be to have a "String" class, which would support conversion to either String or to PackedString, or to CString. Then library functions wanting a String parameter could accept a parameter of any instance of the String type. Functions returning a string could do so using whatever is the most efficient/convenient instance of class String. Perhaps that would be overkill, but it would be nice to be able to do (for example) a getCurrentDirectory and corresponding setCurrentDirectory without ever converting the directory name from a CString to a String (presuming the standard system calls used by getCurrentDirectory etc accept CStrings). -- David Roundy http://www.abridgegame.org _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
