On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 9:18 PM, David Roundy
On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 12:11:15AM +0100, Neil Mitchell wrote:
Hi
What do people think of adding these?
split is sorely lacking, and definately needs to be included. However, my version is different to yours:
I would suggest that when everyone defines a different version of a function, then it isn't actually such a good function to put into the standard libraries.
David
Personally, I disagree. The way I see, the proliferation of splits is a cry for help, pointing to a need for some sort of centralization and cleanup. As it is, there are something like 5 or 6 splits floating around out there (split, split´/splitNeil, splitTwanvl, splitBytestring, splitHSH, and a few others I have not really looked at*). Each one is defined a little differently, and looks different - even if they turn out to be the exact same thing like with split´/splitNeil; so each time a Haskeller needs this they have to roll their own or use someone else´s roll, and of course each one has subtly different edge cases, so there´s no guarantee you actually understand a given split implementation. I would regard having a few well-documented, tested splits in Data.List as an enormous improvement on the status quo - and I would still regard it as so even if it turned out that one needs to add, say, 4 splits. The situation makes me a little queasy. Tons of people like dons or Simon Marlowe or so on agree that a basic list processing function is needed, and we´ve been agreed on that point for two years, but somehow nothing improves, and I go on rewriting split in scripts every so often. * http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2006-July/016574.html -- gwern