[Haskell-cafe] Re: Efficient parallel regular expressions

[Henning Thielemann]

Johannes Waldmann schrieb:
> using strings (inside a program) to represent structured data
> is wrong (*). 
> 
> of course you need strings for interfacing the "outside" world, 
> but the microsecond they get on the inside,
> they should be tokenized and parsed away
> into something useful (= an abstract syntax tree).
>  
> (*) corollary: 
> using strings to represent regular expressions is also wrong...

I consider these regular expression strings an embedded domain-specific
language. It seems to me, that putting regexps into strings was a
work-around, because you could not extend Haskell's syntax. But now
things change with this new GHC feature - what was its name?
Nevertheless, I never used regexps in Haskell programs, parsec is much
nicer.