On 12/09/2012 11:09, Christian Maeder wrote:
My main use-case is simpleHTTP that is bound to the String instance, currently. There are no such short-cuts for byte-strings, are there?
That's a good point. I guess I would make simpleHTTP overloaded while I was making breaking changes anyway.
I'ld suggest to make a proper byte-string interface first
What do you mean by "proper"? Unfortunately I don't really have time to do any substantial refactoring in the near future. Given lots of time now, I'd immediately make high-level and low-level interfaces with encoding only handled in the high-level one.
and then deprecate the String stuff.
Is it possible to deprecate an instance? I could perhaps instead provide an escape hatch with a newtype like UnsafeChar8String or something, either temporarily or permanently.
(before calling Char8.pack, strings could be checked or filtered for "isAscii")
The problem is more on the download side; if it's a wide encoding like UTF-16, even 7-bit cleanliness isn't enough to make Char8.unpack safe. On the upload side, automatically using UTF-8 would probably be good enough. Cheers, Ganesh