[Haskell-cafe] Copying Arrays

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2008-05-30 at 10:38 +0200, Ketil Malde wrote:
> "Johan Tibell" <johan.tibell at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> >> I guess this is where I don't follow: why would you need more short
> >> strings for Unicode text than for ASCII or 8-bit latin text?
> 
> > But ByteStrings are neither ASCII nor 8-bit Latin text! 
>   [...] 
> > The intent of the not-yet-existing Unicode string is to represent
> > text not bytes. 
> 
> Right, so this will replace the .Char8 modules as well? 

No, there is still a use-case for that, namely all these network
protocols and file formats that mix binary and ASCII data.

The only bad thing about the .Char8 modules is how people have picked
them up to represent text exclusively which is a step back from [Char]
in terms of Unicode stuff.

> What confused me was my misunderstanding Duncan to mean that Unicode
> text would somehow imply shorter strings than non-Unicode (i.e. 8-bit)
> text.

ByteString is already not a good choice for short ASCII text.

Duncan