13 Aug
2010
13 Aug
'10
4:47 p.m.
Excerpts from Kevin Jardine's message of Fri Aug 13 16:37:14 -0400 2010:
I find it disturbing that a modern programming language like Haskell still apparently forces you to choose between a representation for "mostly ASCII text" and Unicode.
Surely efficient Unicode text should always be the default? And if the Unicode format used by the Text library is not efficient enough then can't that be fixed?
For what it's worth, Java uses UTF-16 representation internally for strings, and thus also wastes space. There is something to be said for UTF-8 in-memory representation, but it takes a lot of care. A newtype for dirty and clean UTF-8 may come in handy. Cheers, Edward