On Mon, 2009-01-12 at 21:36 -0800, Alexander Dunlap wrote:
My personal opinion here is that there should be no split function in Data.List. Brent has put together a very nice splitting package; if we want this to be more accessible, we should put it in the Haskell Platform or whatever "blessing" procedure is established.
That is a possibility.
Putting the split functions back into Data.List after they've already been added to a comprehensive splitting library is just going to be arbitrary no matter which ones we choose.
Not necessarily arbitrary. The Data.List collection is not some canonical orthogonal basis of all list functions, it's a collection of frequently used (and mostly orthogonal, composable etc) list functions. So it may be that by looking at how split functions are used in Haskell code in general that we can identify one or two that are both reasonably general and used reasonably frequently. On the other hand we may find that there are not! :-) Duncan