On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 22:07, Donn Cave
Am I confused about this? It's why I can't see Text ever being simply the obvious choice. [Char] will continue to be the obvious choice if you want a functional data type that supports pattern matching etc. ByteString will continue to be the obvious choice for big data loads. We'll have a three way choice between programming elegance, correctness and efficiency. If Haskell were more than just a research language, this might be its most prominent open sore, don't you think?
I don't see why [Char] is "obvious" -- you'd never use [Word8] for storing binary data, right? [Char] is popular because it's the default type for string literals, and due to simple inertia, but when there's a type based on packed arrays there's no reason to use the list representation. Also, despite the name, ByteString and Text are for separate purposes. ByteString is an efficient [Word8], Text is an efficient [Char] -- use ByteString for binary data, and Text for...text. Most mature languages have both types, though the choice of UTF-16 for Text is unusual.