Jason Dagit
On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 4:03 PM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic <
So, the real issue here is that there is not yet a good abstraction over what we consider to be textual data, and instead people have to code to a specific data type.
Isn't this the same problem we have with numeric literals? I might even go so far as to suggest it's going to be a problem with all types of literals.
Not just literals; there is no common way of doing a character replacement (e.g. map toUpper) in a textual type for example.
Isn't it also a problem which is partially solved with the OverloadedStrings extension? http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/ghc/docs/6.12.2/html/users_guide/type-class-exten...
That just convert literals; it doesn't provide a common API.
It seems like the interface exposed by ByteString could be in a type class. At that point, would the problem be solved?
To a certain extent, yes. There is no one typeclass that could cover everything (especially since something as simple as toUpper won't work if I understand Bryan's ß -> SS example), but it would help in the majority of cases. There has been one attempt, but it doesn't seem very popular (tagsoup has another, but it's meant to be internal only): http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/ListLike/latest/doc/html/Data-Li... -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com