On 20 May, Frank A. Christoph wrote:
>
> > > I would welcome either. However, there is a huge body of code that
> > > assumes strings are lists of chars.
> >
> > Yes, obviously... this is for new programs (which people aren't writing
> > because of Haskell's inefficiency in dealing with strings).
>
> While I think Haskell should also support primitive random-access strings,
> String as [Char] is not all that inefficient for many purposes, thanks to
> laziness. After all, the world's most famous text-processing language, Perl,
> represents strings as character lists too.
I think the reall absence here is a standard string processing library
for strings of any type whatever. The first step would be to put one
together for [Char], surely? While it makes sense to think about
alternative representations at the outset (and possibly use them
internally), the absence of a full-featured string processing library
is more of an obstacle than it's lack of efficiency.
--
Jón Fairbairn [EMAIL PROTECTED]
18 Kimberley Road [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cambridge CB4 1HH +44 1223 570179 (pm only, please)
