Edward Kmett wrote:
Like I said, my objection to including Text is a lot less strong than
my feelings on any notion of deprecating String.
[..]
The pedagogical concern is quite real, remember many introductory
lanuage classes have time to present Haskell and the list data type
and not much else. Showing parsing through pattern matching on
strings makes a very powerful tool, its harder to show that with
Text.
[..]
The major benefits of Text come from FFI opportunities, but even
there if you dig into its internals it has to copy out of the array
to talk to foreign functions because it lives in unpinned memory
unlike ByteString.
I agree with Edward Kmett on the virtues of String = [Char] for
learning Haskell. I'm teaching beginners regularly and it is simply
eye-opening for them that they can use the familiar list operations to
solve real world problems which usually involve textual data.
Which brings me to the fundamental question behind this proposal: Why do
we need Text at all? What are its virtues and how do they compare? What
is the trade-off? (I'm not familiar enough with the Text library to
answer these.)
To put it very pointedly: is a %20 performance increase on the current
generation of computers worth the cost in terms of ease-of-use, when the
performance can equally be gained by buying a faster computer or more
RAM? I'm not sure whether I even agree with this statement, but this is
the trade-off we are deciding on.
Best regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus
--
http://apfelmus.nfshost.com
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