[Haskell-cafe] Re: String vs ByteString

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

Kevin Jardine wrote:

> With respect, I disagree with that approach.
> 
> Almost every modern programming language has one or at most two
> standard representations for strings.

I think having two makes sense, one for arrays of arbitrary
binary bytes and one for some unicode data format, preferably
UTF-8.
 
> That includes PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl and many others. The lack of a
> standard text representation in Haskell has created a crazy patchwork
> of incompatible libraries requiring explicit and often inefficient
> conversions to connect them together.
> 
> I expect Haskell to be higher level than those other languages so that
> I can ignore the lower level details and focus on the algorithms. But
> in fact the string issue forces me to deal with lower level details
> than even PHP requires. I end up with a program littered with ugly
> pack, unpack, toString, fromString and similar calls.
> 
> That just doesn't feel right to me.

That is what I was trying to say whenI started this thread. Thank
you.

Erik
-- 
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Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/