Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: String vs ByteString

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 4:03 PM, Ivan Lazar Miljenovic < ivan.miljenovic@gmail.com> wrote:

Kevin Jardine writes:

...

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.

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. 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... It seems like the interface exposed by ByteString could be in a type class. At that point, would the problem be solved? Jason