Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: Efficient parallel regular expressions

Johannes Waldmann schrieb:

using strings (inside a program) to represent structured data is wrong (*).

of course you need strings for interfacing the "outside" world, but the microsecond they get on the inside, they should be tokenized and parsed away into something useful (= an abstract syntax tree).

(*) corollary: using strings to represent regular expressions is also wrong...

I consider these regular expression strings an embedded domain-specific language. It seems to me, that putting regexps into strings was a work-around, because you could not extend Haskell's syntax. But now things change with this new GHC feature - what was its name? Nevertheless, I never used regexps in Haskell programs, parsec is much nicer.