String != [Char]

[Henrik Nilsson]

Hi all,

Simon Marlow wrote:

 > So I'm far from convinced that [Char] is a bad default for the String 
 > type.  But it's important that as far as possible Text should not be
 > a second class citizen, so I'd support adding OverloadedStrings to
 > the language, and maybe looking at overloading some of the String
 > APIs in the standard libraries.

I agree completely.

 > One more thing: historically, performance considerations have been
 > given a fairly low priority in the language design process for
 > Haskell, and rightly so.
 > [...]
 > we should be glad that Haskell is not burdened with (many) legacy
 > warts that were invented to work around performance problems that no 
 > longer exist.  I'm not saying that this means we should ignore Text
 > as a performance hack, just that performance should not come at the
 > expense of good language design.

Well said.

And as Isaac Dupree reminded us:

 > How is Text for small strings currently (e.g. one English word, if
 > not one character)?  Can we reasonably recommend it for that?
 > This recent question suggests it's still not great:
 > http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9398572/memory-efficient-strings- 
in-haskell

even if performance was the sole goal, the "right choice" (as always)
is hardly clear cut.

Best,

/Henrik

-- 
Henrik Nilsson
School of Computer Science
The University of Nottingham
nhn at cs.nott.ac.uk