Why are strings linked lists?

[Simon Marlow]

> Unless I'm missing something, the only "support" that GHC provides is
> that Char is 4 bytes.

GHC 6.2 (shortly to be released) also supports toUpper, toLower, and the
character predicates isUpper, isLower etc. on the full Unicode character
set.

There is one caveat: the implementation is based on the C library's
towupper() and so on, so the support is only as good as the C library
provides, and it relies on wchar_t being equivalent to Unicode (the
sensible choice, but not all libcs do this).

Proper support for character set conversions in the I/O library has been
talked about for some time, and there are a couple of implementations
out there.  I think ultimately this should be part of a complete
redesign of the I/O library based around streams (see recent discussion
on the libraries list).

Cheers,
	Simon