String != [Char]

[Greg Weber]

On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 5:39 PM, Gabriel Dos Reis
<gdr at integrable-solutions.net> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 6:54 PM, Henrik Nilsson <nhn at cs.nott.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> In any case, this is hardly the place to to discuss how to best
>> teach Haskell or programming in general.
>
> Sure, I haven't seen any disagreement with that.

As interesting as this discussion is, I think this agreement is the
perfect segway to take it off list. Debating the usefulness of String
= [Char] does not seem to be productive here anyways. What would be
helpful is if alternatives were offered, tested out, and shared among
the teaching community. If this requires any changes to the language
(other than what is being discussed now), please let us know.

The Prelude is still going to export list functions whether they are
used on [Char] or not. So we are still in the position of requiring
qualified imports for Text functions or needing to change the Text
package or something about the language to avoid conflicts with list
functions.