RE: Why are strings linked lists?

As a matter of pure speculation, how big an impact would it have if, in the next "version" of Haskell, Strings were represented as opaque types with appropriate functions to convert to and from [Char]? Would there be rioting in the streets?

Andrew Bromage

I would complain. I don't care much about efficiency (though it still bothers me that I don't have an answer yet to the memory leak I posted some time ago), and the easiness of dealing with strings as lists is quite important to me. Expliciting packing and unpacking would be an incovenience. Wojtek