On 17 March 2012 01:44, Greg Weber
the text library and Text data type have shown the worth in real world Haskell usage with GHC. I try to avoid String whenever possible, but I still have to deal with conversions and other issues. There is a lot of real work to be done to convert away from [Char], but I think we need to take it out of the language definition as a first step.
I'm pretty sure the majoirty of people would agree that if we were making the Haskell standard nowadays we'd make String type abstract. Unfortunately I fear making the change now will be quite disruptive, though I don't think we've collectively put much effort yet into working out just how disruptive. In principle I'd support changing to reduce the number of string types used in interfaces. From painful professional experience, I think that one of the biggest things where C++ went wrong was not having a single string type that everyone would use (I once had to write a C++ component integrating code that used 5 different string types). Like Python 3, we should have two common string types used in interfaces: string and bytes (with implementations like our current Text and ByteString). BTW, I don't think taking it out of the langauge would be a helpful step. We actually want to tell people "use *this* string type in interfaces", not leave everyone to make their own choice. I think taking it out of the language would tend to encourage everyone to make their own choice. Duncan