Why are strings linked lists?

[David Roundy]

On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 04:56:02PM -0500, Mark Carroll wrote:
> (shifting to Haskell-Cafe)
> 
> On Fri, 28 Nov 2003, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> 
> > ajb:
> (snip)
> > > As a matter of pure speculation, how big an impact would it have if, in
> > > the next "version" of Haskell, Strings were represented as opaque types
> > > with appropriate functions to convert to and from [Char]?  Would there be
> > > rioting in the streets?
> 
> I'd be sad to lose some convenient list-based string type because I make a
> lot of use of the fact that strings are lists in processing them.

I agree.  What I think might be a nice compromise at some point would be to
have a "String" class, which would support conversion to either String or
to PackedString, or to CString.  Then library functions wanting a String
parameter could accept a parameter of any instance of the String type.
Functions returning a string could do so using whatever is the most
efficient/convenient instance of class String.  Perhaps that would be
overkill, but it would be nice to be able to do (for example) a
getCurrentDirectory and corresponding setCurrentDirectory without ever
converting the directory name from a CString to a String (presuming the
standard system calls used by getCurrentDirectory etc accept CStrings).
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org