Kevin Jardine <kevinjardine@gmail.com> 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.