Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:
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?
For me, there would rather be celebration :), especially if these could be tuned to only use 8 bits.
What do you mean with this? Hopefully, not dropping Unicode support because this would be a very bad idea, IMHO.
What Unicode support? Simply claiming that values of type Char are Unicode characters doesn't make it so. Actually supporting Unicode would require re-implementing toUpper, toLower and the is* functions, as well as at least re-implementing the I/O library (and, realistically, re-designing it; while you *could* just force the use of a specific encoding, the result of doing so would be an I/O system which was almost worthless for real use). Right now, values of type Char are, in reality, ISO Latin-1 codepoints padded out to 4 bytes per char. It isn't possible to "drop" support which isn't there. -- Glynn Clements <glynn.clements@virgin.net>