Hi all, Simon Marlow wrote:
So I'm far from convinced that [Char] is a bad default for the String type. But it's important that as far as possible Text should not be a second class citizen, so I'd support adding OverloadedStrings to the language, and maybe looking at overloading some of the String APIs in the standard libraries.
I agree completely.
One more thing: historically, performance considerations have been given a fairly low priority in the language design process for Haskell, and rightly so. [...] we should be glad that Haskell is not burdened with (many) legacy warts that were invented to work around performance problems that no longer exist. I'm not saying that this means we should ignore Text as a performance hack, just that performance should not come at the expense of good language design.
Well said. And as Isaac Dupree reminded us:
How is Text for small strings currently (e.g. one English word, if not one character)? Can we reasonably recommend it for that? This recent question suggests it's still not great: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9398572/memory-efficient-strings- in-haskell
even if performance was the sole goal, the "right choice" (as always) is hardly clear cut. Best, /Henrik -- Henrik Nilsson School of Computer Science The University of Nottingham nhn@cs.nott.ac.uk