On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 04:56:02PM -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.
I agree. What I think might be a nice compromise at some point would be to have a "String" class, which would support conversion to either String or to PackedString, or to CString. Then library functions wanting a String parameter could accept a parameter of any instance of the String type. Functions returning a string could do so using whatever is the most efficient/convenient instance of class String. Perhaps that would be overkill, but it would be nice to be able to do (for example) a getCurrentDirectory and corresponding setCurrentDirectory without ever converting the directory name from a CString to a String (presuming the standard system calls used by getCurrentDirectory etc accept CStrings). -- David Roundy http://www.abridgegame.org