Why are strings linked lists?

[John Meacham]

On Fri, Nov 28, 2003 at 09:21:50PM +0000, Glynn Clements wrote:
> What Unicode support?
> 
> Simply claiming that values of type Char are Unicode characters
> doesn't make it so.
> 
> Actually supporting Unicode would require re-implementing toUpper,
> toLower and the is* functions, as well as at least re-implementing the
> I/O library (and, realistically, re-designing it; while you *could*
> just force the use of a specific encoding, the result of doing so
> would be an I/O system which was almost worthless for real use).
> 
> Right now, values of type Char are, in reality, ISO Latin-1 codepoints
> padded out to 4 bytes per char.
> 
> It isn't possible to "drop" support which isn't there.

I use unicode support with ghc all the time. using my CWString library
and an alternate set of h* routines. Works quite well. A standard UTF8
packed string type might be handy though.
        John

-- 
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John Meacham - California Institute of Technology, Alum. - john at foo.net
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