[Haskell-cafe] Instances of `IsString`.

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi Jason,

I believe the original purpose of IsString was to enable writing of
DSL's, much like described in this paper:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1411236

As such, you might find far more uses of IsString inside DSL's, some
of which are likely to remain private. It was never designed to be a
feature for every day use, but if you need it (as you do for Paradise)
then it's hard to live without.

Thanks, Neil

On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 10:39 PM, Jason Dusek <jason.dusek at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/12/20 Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH <allbery at ece.cmu.edu>:
>> On Dec 20, 2009, at 17:09 , Jason Dusek wrote:
>> >
>> > A quick check on Hayoo! and in my interpreter shows that
>> > there are basically no instances of `IsString`. Is it
>> > really so little used?
>>
>>
>> The only 2 instances I'm aware of are String and lazy and strict
>> ByteStrings.  It's not clear to me that there need to be any more (well,
>> maybe the packed Unicode string package on hackage).
>
>  It could be easily abused, that is for sure.
>
> --
> Jason Dusek
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