Kevin Jardine wrote:
With respect, I disagree with that approach.
Almost every modern programming language has one or at most two standard representations for strings.
I think having two makes sense, one for arrays of arbitrary binary bytes and one for some unicode data format, preferably UTF-8.
That includes PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl and many others. The lack of a standard text representation in Haskell has created a crazy patchwork of incompatible libraries requiring explicit and often inefficient conversions to connect them together.
I expect Haskell to be higher level than those other languages so that I can ignore the lower level details and focus on the algorithms. But in fact the string issue forces me to deal with lower level details than even PHP requires. I end up with a program littered with ugly pack, unpack, toString, fromString and similar calls.
That just doesn't feel right to me.
That is what I was trying to say whenI started this thread. Thank you. Erik -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/