On Thu, Nov 27, 2003 at 10:54:11PM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > OK, to be fair, it does make string-to-string operations a bit more > convenient. Apart from undergraduate homework exercises and some > specific domains, though, this isn't exactly the "common case" of > all situations where people want strings. > > 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 also have wondered how much the string representation hurts haskell program performance.. Something I'd like to see (perhaps a bit less drastic) would be a String class, similar to Num so string constants would have type String a => a then we can make [Char], PackedString, and whatnot instances. It should at least make working with alternate string representations easier. John -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Meacham - California Institute of Technology, Alum. - [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell