String != [Char]

[Freddie Manners]

To add my tuppence-worth on this, addressed to no-one in particular:

(1) I think getting hung up on UTF-8 correctness is a distraction here.  I
can't imagine anyone suggesting that the C/C++ standards removed support
for (char*) because it wasn't UTF-8 correct: sure, you'd recommend people
use a different type when it matters, but the language standard itself
shouldn't be driven by technical issues that don't affect most people most
of the time.  I'm sure it's good engineering practice to worry about these
things, but the standard isn't there to encourage good engineering practice.

(2) I'd suggest that a proposal that advocated overloaded string literals
-- of which [Char] was an option -- couldn't be much more confusing from a
pedagogical perspective than the fact that numeric literals are overloaded.
 Since that seems to be one of the main biases in favour of [Char] in the
current standard, that might be a possible incremental fix.

Best,
Freddie

On 24 March 2012 22:15, Ian Lynagh <igloo at earth.li> wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 08:38:23PM +0000, Thomas Schilling wrote:
> > On 24 March 2012 20:16, Ian Lynagh <igloo at earth.li> wrote:
> > >
> > >> Correctness
> > >> ==========
> > >>
> > >> Using list-based operations on Strings are almost always wrong
> > >
> > > Data.Text seems to think that many of them are worth reimplementing for
> > > Text. It looks like someone's systematically gone through Data.List.
> >
> > That's exactly what happened as part of the platform inclusion
> > process.  In fact, there was quite a bit of bike shedding whether the
> > Text API should be compatible with the list API or not.  In the end
> > the decision was made to add all the list functions even if that
> > encouraged running into unicode issues.  I'm pretty sure you
> > participated in that discussion.
>
> As far as I remember, a few functions were added to text and bytestring
> during that, but mostly the discussion was about naming.
>
> Even in the first 0.1 release of bytestring:
>
> http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/text/0.1/doc/html/Data-Text.html
> there is a large amount of Data.List covered, e.g. map, transpose,
> foldl1', minimum, mapAccumR, groupBy.
>
>
> Thanks
> Ian
>
>
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