[Haskell-cafe] FastString a misnomer

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello John,

Thursday, October 20, 2005, 4:12:36 AM, you wrote:

JM> FastString seems to be a misnomer for this library.

JM> what it provides is a fast _byte array_ with a lot of useful
JM> operations, but it does not provide strings since it does not enforce
JM> character encodings in the type system, which would be vital for a real
JM> FastString library. In any case, just had to get that off my chest :)

may be it can be named ByteArray? and then FastString.Latin1,
FastString.UTF8... will use its utilities

also, all UTF8 utilities may be placed outside of FastString.UTF8
module, because it can be used for something else

btw, FastString is also a bit misnamed. it's really a CompactString.
ghc's FastString was named so, imho, just because they provided hashes
for fast string comparision

-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:bulatz at HotPOP.com