On Thu, Nov 27, 2003 at 10:54:11PM -0500, ajb@spamcop.net wrote:
OK, to be fair, it does make string-to-string operations a bit more convenient. Apart from undergraduate homework exercises and some specific domains, though, this isn't exactly the "common case" of all situations where people want strings.
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?
I also have wondered how much the string representation hurts haskell program performance.. Something I'd like to see (perhaps a bit less drastic) would be a String class, similar to Num so string constants would have type String a => a then we can make [Char], PackedString, and whatnot instances. It should at least make working with alternate string representations easier. John -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Meacham - California Institute of Technology, Alum. - john@foo.net ---------------------------------------------------------------------------