At 16:56 28/11/03 -0500, Mark Carroll wrote:
(shifting to Haskell-Cafe)
On Fri, 28 Nov 2003, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
ajb: (snip)
As a matter of pure speculation, how big an impact would it have if, in the next "version" of Haskell, Strings were represented as opaque types with appropriate functions to convert to and from [Char]? Would there be rioting in the streets?
I'd be sad to lose some convenient list-based string type because I make a lot of use of the fact that strings are lists in processing them.
+1 Following this debate, I find myself wondering if this is not something that might be optimized "behind the scenes" as a common case, rather than changing the computational model presented. I use strings a lot, and thus far I've not been aware that they've been a performance problem for me. #g --
You could look at GHC's FastString representation (used internally). It is in $fptools/ghc/compiler/utils/FastString.lhs
It does make sense to have a rather faster form of string conveniently available in /some/ form.
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