On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Ian Lynagh
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the issue, so my question was too specific. AIUI the motivation for the current text API is:
The design of the Text library encourages the use of substring operations because these are expected to be more commonly used and because correct handling of Unicode often requires substring operations (due to issues with combining characters).
Actually, my motivation in using the types I did was due to ease and frequency of use and ease of providing good performance. I didn't look to existing Haskell libraries for the ease-of-use perspective, but instead to Python and Perl. Whether or not this helped or hindered handling of Unicode wasn't a factor; it helped *programmibility*.