On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 8:39 AM, Edward Z. Yang <ezyang@mit.edu> wrote:

Excerpts from John Millikin's message of Sun Aug 15 01:32:51 -0400 2010:

> 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.

Given that both Python, .NET, Java and Windows use UTF-16 for their Unicode
text representations, I cannot really agree with "unusual". :-)

When I'm writing a web app, my code is sitting on a Linux system where the default encoding is UTF-8, communicating with a database speaking UTF-8, receiving request bodies in UTF-8 and sending response bodies in UTF-8. So converting all of that data to UTF-16, just to be converted right back to UTF-8, does seem strange for that purpose.

Remember, Python, .NET and Java are all imperative languages without referential transparency. I doubt saying they do something some way will influence most Haskell coders much ;).

Michael