Re: [Haskell-cafe] Typeclass for functions taking different kinds of strings

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Taru Karttunen wrote:

Hello

It seems like a very common issue to have an API like:

foo :: String -> Foo fooBS :: ByteString -> Foo fooLBS:: L.ByteString -> Foo

is there currently a library that makes unifying them easy?

They cannot be completely unified. A sequence of Unicode characters (String) is not the same kind of thing as a sequence of bytes (ByteString). Going between the two requires an encoding. A shared abstraction would support a subset of operations that make sense on all sequences. Cheers, Johan