String != [Char]

[Johan Tibell]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 3:33 PM, Freddie Manners <f.manners at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

(I assume you mean Unicode correctness. UTF-8 is only one possible
encoding. Also I'm not arguing for removing type String = [Char], I
arguing why Text is better than String.)

C++'s char* is morally equivalent of our ByteString, not Text. There's
no standardized C++ Unicode string type, ICU's UnicodeString is
perhaps the closest to one.

-- Johan