Kevin Jardine
Hi Don,
With respect, I disagree with that approach.
Almost every modern programming language has one or at most two standard representations for strings.
Almost every modern programming language thinks you can whack a print statement wherever you like... ;-)
That includes PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl and many others. The lack of a standard text representation in Haskell has created a crazy patchwork of incompatible libraries requiring explicit and often inefficient conversions to connect them together.
I expect Haskell to be higher level than those other languages so that I can ignore the lower level details and focus on the algorithms. But in fact the string issue forces me to deal with lower level details than even PHP requires. I end up with a program littered with ugly pack, unpack, toString, fromString and similar calls.
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. -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com