String != [Char]

[Greg Weber]

Does Python 3 have the equivalent of LANGUAGE pragmas? That is, as a
GHC user i can add {-# LANGUAGE OLD_STRINGS -#} and my program works
with the new language standard!

I think what ruined Perl 6 is that it is still under development!
Avoiding breakage is important. But throwing around comparisons to
Perl 6 is not going to help move the discussion along!

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 6:33 AM, Christian Siefkes
<christian at siefkes.net> wrote:
> On 03/23/2012 02:13 PM, ARJANEN Loïc Jean David wrote:
>> 2012/3/22 Greg Weber <greg at gregweber.info>:
>> But now we have at least two tasks to do before we can put up the
>> proposal: define what operations should be supported by String and
>> should we apply this proposal in the next batch. Given that this
>> proposal will break many codebases (we shouldn't hope to apply all of
>> list's syntax to this string type) should we apply it alone or wait
>> until we have more other codebase-breakers to apply ?
>
> I very much hope that the Haskell committee will never ever accept a
> proposal that "will break many codebases"! That's what ruined Perl 6 und
> Python 3, and quite unnecessarily so.
>
> Even if I a future Haskell standard defines String as something that doesn't
> have to be implemented as a list of Char, it still would have to behave as
> if it was [Char] for most practical purposes (except performance-wise, of
> course!). That's necessary for compatibility. Or String could just be
> complemented with an additional standardized Text type, as Greg suggested.
>
> Best regards
>        Christian
>
> --
> |------- Dr. Christian Siefkes ------- christian at siefkes.net -------
> | Homepage: http://www.siefkes.net/ | Blog: http://www.keimform.de/
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> Just so that nobody takes his guess for the full truth, here's my standing
> on "keeping control", in 2 words (three?):
> I won't.
>        -- Linus Torvalds, The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate
>
>
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