On 2009 Mar 6, at 11:13, Wolfgang Jeltsch wrote:

Am Freitag, 6. März 2009 13:33 schrieb Matthew Pocock:

...

It seems every time I look at hackage there is yet another stringy datatype. For lots of apps, the particular stringy datatype you use matters for performance but not algorithmic reasons. Perhaps this is a good time for someone to propose a stringy class?

There is already the class IsString which was introduced for overloaded string literals.

However, the name is terrible. No other Haskell class I know of has an “Is” at its beginning. Classes don’t name properties (IsNum, IsMonoid, Has…).

But their proper names were available. "String" is already taken for a concrete type, which complicates things; "IsString" was the simplest answer (and possibly avoided bikeshedding by being the answer nobody liked :)

Maybe you can also try to convince the masters of the IsString class to change the class name. My previous attempts through mailing list e-mails seemed to have no effect. :-(

I think the problem here is you need to get buy-in from everyone involved, which includes libraries@ (String), ghc (IsString is recognized in order to enable string overloading), ByteString, and potentially anyone who uses any of the above. That said, if you want to officially propose it you need to read up on how to properly propose such changes to libraries@haskell.org. -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH