I was wondering if anyone's thought of overloading string literals in the
same way that numeric literals are overloaded. I know that I tend to use
PackedStrings for almost everything, primarly due to the RegExp stuff and
efficiency. This means my code is littered with "unpackPS" and
"packString", as in
... if foo == packString "bar" ...
or
... if unpackPS foo == "bar" ...
I was wondering if someone might consider overloading Strings,
too. Something like:
class StringLiteral s where
fromString :: String -> s
toString :: s -> String -- not necessary, really
then literals in haskell source could be converted from
... "foo" ...
to
... (fromString "foo") ...
we'd have instances like
instance StringLiteral String where fromString = id
instance StringLiteral PackedString where fromString = packString
...etc...
if not something in ghc, perhaps this might find its way into drift???
- hal
--
Hal Daume III
"Computer science is no more about computers | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
than astronomy is about telescopes." -Dijkstra | www.isi.edu/~hdaume
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