On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 6:54 PM, Henrik Nilsson
In any case, this is hardly the place to to discuss how to best teach Haskell or programming in general.
Sure, I haven't seen any disagreement with that. Note however that the "pedagogical" arguments was brought in as support for the [Char] definition. It is only natural that it being challenged on that ground.
Nor is the Haskell standard a vehicle to prescribe how Haskell should be taught or for what reasons Haskell should be taught:
I have not seen any assertion to that effect.
that can only be decided by individual educators based in their experience and given a specific teaching context.
True, but should the language definition default to a string type that is one the most unsuited for text processing in the 21st century where global multilingualism abounds? Even C has qualms about that.
Given intimate knowledge of our specific teaching context here at Nottingham, I can say that removing String = [Char] from the language wouldn't be helpful to us.
I have no doubt believing that if all texts my students have to process are US ASCII, [Char] is more than sufficient. So, I have sympathy for your position. However, I doubt [Char] would be adequate if I ask them to shared texts from their diverse cultures. Should the language definition make it much harder to share such experience in classroom when the primary argument for [Char] is pedagogy? -- Gaby