[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANNOUNCE: text 0.8.0.0, fast Unicode text support

Hi Tako, The issues involved with String, ByteString, Text and a few related libraries were discussed at great length recently in this thread: http://groups.google.com/group/haskell-cafe/browse_thread/thread/52a21cf61ff... Basically, Chars are 32 bit integers and Strings are represented as a list of Chars. This is very convenient for small computations but often very inefficient for anything large scale. The String API is also missing various encoding related features. Because of the limitations of String, various alternative libraries have been proposed. Text is one important option. You'll find much more detail on the above referenced thread. Kevin On Sep 1, 8:13 am, Tako Schotanus wrote:

On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 07:14, John Millikin wrote:

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Don't forget, you can always improve the text library yourself. I love to receive patches, requests for improvement, and bug reports.

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Are there any areas in particular you'd like help with, for either library? I'm happy to assist any effort which will help reduce use of String.

As a Haskell noob I'm curious about this statement, is there something intrinsically wrong with String? Or is it more a performance/resource problem when dealing with large amounts of text for example? (Like having to use StringBuilder in Java if you want to avoid the penalty of repeated String allocations when simply concatenating for example)

Cheers,  -Tako

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