String != [Char]
Tillmann Rendel
rendel at informatik.uni-marburg.de
Tue Mar 20 16:29:27 CET 2012
Hi,
Thomas Schilling wrote:
> I agree that the language standard should not prescribe the
> implementation of a Text datatype. It should instead require an
> abstract data type (which may just be a newtype wrapper for [Char] in
> some implementations) and a (minimal) set of operations on it.
>
> Regarding the type class for converting to and from that type, there
> is a perhaps more complicated question: The current fromString method
> uses String as the source type which causes unnecessary overhead.
Is this still a problem if String would be replaced by an
implementation-dependend newtype? Presumably, GHC would use a more
efficient representation behind the newtype, so the following would be
efficient in practice (or not?)
newtype String
= ...
class IsString a where
fromString :: String -> a
The standard could even prescribe that an instance for [Char] exists:
explode :: String -> [Char]
explode = ...
instance IsString [Char] where
fromString = explode
Tillmann
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