Re: String != [Char]

On 03/23/2012 02:13 PM, ARJANEN Loïc Jean David wrote:

2012/3/22 Greg Weber : But now we have at least two tasks to do before we can put up the proposal: define what operations should be supported by String and should we apply this proposal in the next batch. Given that this proposal will break many codebases (we shouldn't hope to apply all of list's syntax to this string type) should we apply it alone or wait until we have more other codebase-breakers to apply ?

I very much hope that the Haskell committee will never ever accept a proposal that "will break many codebases"! That's what ruined Perl 6 und Python 3, and quite unnecessarily so. Even if I a future Haskell standard defines String as something that doesn't have to be implemented as a list of Char, it still would have to behave as if it was [Char] for most practical purposes (except performance-wise, of course!). That's necessary for compatibility. Or String could just be complemented with an additional standardized Text type, as Greg suggested. Best regards Christian -- |------- Dr. Christian Siefkes ------- christian@siefkes.net ------- | Homepage: http://www.siefkes.net/ | Blog: http://www.keimform.de/ | Peer Production Everywhere: http://peerconomy.org/wiki/ |---------------------------------- OpenPGP Key ID: 0x346452D8 -- Just so that nobody takes his guess for the full truth, here's my standing on "keeping control", in 2 words (three?): I won't. -- Linus Torvalds, The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate