String literals

[Lennart Augustsson]

To follow up on my own post.  I implemented the overloaded strings  
last night and it seems to work pretty well.  I've not done anything  
about defaulting yet.  I don't know how much of a problem this will  
be in practice.

On Nov 10, 2006, at 22:49 , Lennart Augustsson wrote:

> I think it's time that string literals got overloaded just like  
> numeric literals.  There are several reasons for this.  One reason  
> is the new fast string libraries.  They are great, but string  
> literals don't work; you need to pack them first.  Another reason  
> is the increasing use of Haskell for DSELs.  In a DSEL you might  
> want string literals to have a different type than the ordinary  
> String.
>
> I have not implemented anything yet, but I would like to see  
> something along the lines of the following:
>
> class IsString s where
>     fromString :: String -> s
> instance IsString String where
>     fromString = id
>
> The instance declaration is not allowed in Haskell-98, but it can  
> be rewritten as
> class IsChar c where  -- Make this class local to it's defining module
>     fromChar :: Char -> c
> instance IsChar Char where
>     fromChar = id
> instance (IsChar c) => IsString [c] where
>     fromString = map fromChar
>
> And, like with numeric literals, any string literal will then have  
> an implicit fromString insert to make the right conversion.
>
> My guess is that the defaulting mechanism needs to be extended to  
> default to the String type as well, or we'll get some ambiguous  
> expressions.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> 	-- Lennart
>
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