Re: [Haskell-cafe] unicode text libraries

On Mon, 2009-09-28 at 18:32 +0200, Johan Tibell wrote:

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 6:15 PM, Don Stewart wrote:

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tittoassini:

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2009/9/28 Don Stewart :

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titto:

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Hi,

I am looking for an unicode strings library, I found on hackage:

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/compact-string

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/text

They both look solid and functionally complete so ... I don't know which one to use :-)

As I am sure I am not the first one facing this choice, may I ask which one you preferred and why?

Also, I don't think that a Unicode type should mention what encoding it uses as it's an implementation detail.

I would put it more strongly. The encoding should not be in the API because it makes it harder to compose functionality. While there may be some circumstances where for performance reasons you may want precise control over the internal encoding, that is not appropriate to use in component interfaces. I know we've made this worse recently, but a proliferation of different string types makes it harder to reuse code. An exposed encoding parameter makes that even worse. Duncan