[Haskell-cafe] Motion to unify all the string data types

[Francesco Mazzoli]

At Mon, 12 Nov 2012 11:21:42 +0800,
John Lato wrote:
> Speaking as the ListLike maintainer, I'd like this too.  But it's difficult to
> do so without sacrificing performance.  In some cases, sacrificing *a lot* of
> performance.  So they have to be class members.
> 
> However, there's no reason ListLike has to remain a single monolithic class.
> I'd prefer an API that's split up into several classes, as was done in Edison.
> Then 'ListLike' itself would just be a type synonym, or possibly a small type
> class with the appropriate superclasses.

Interesting.  Are we sure that we can't convince GHC to inline the functions
with enough pragmas?

> However this seems like a lot of work for relatively little payoff, which
> makes it a low priority for me.

Fair enough.

> The community's view on newtypes is funny.  On the one hand, I see all the
> time the claim "Just use a newtype wrapper to write instances for ..."
> (e.g. the recent suggestion of 'instance Num a => Num (a,a)'.  On the other,
> nobody actually seems to want to use these newtype wrappers.  Maybe it
> clutters the code?  I don't know.
> 
> I couldn't think of a better way to implement this functionality, patches
> would be gratefully accepted.  Anyway, you really shouldn't use these wrappers
> unless you're using a ByteString to represent ASCII text.  Which you shouldn't
> be doing anyway.  If you're using a ByteString to represent a sequence of
> bytes, you needn't ever encounter CharString.

Well newtypes are good, the problem is that either you use well accepted ones
(e.g. the `Sum' and `Product' in base) or otherwise it's not worth it, because
people are going to unpack them and use their owns.  What I would do is simply
define those instances in separate modules.

> Given that text and vector are both in the Haskell Platform, I wouldn't object
> to these instances being rolled into the main ListLike package.  Any comments
> on this?

I think it's much better, especially for Text, since if you use ListLike you are
probably using it with Text (at least in my experience).  Not a big deal anyway.

Francesco.