On Sun, Nov 7, 2010 at 12:49 PM, Ian Lynagh <igloo@earth.li> wrote:
> 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.