Haskell Platform Proposal: add the 'text' library

[Johan Tibell]

Hi all,

I've updated the list of open issues. I should have done so while each
issue was being discussed, but I didn't do so. My apologies. If you
think there is a significant open issue that I haven't listed, please
drop me an email and I'll add it.

Note that the list of open issues is not necessarily the same as as a
list of changes to make to the package. They are there so we can track
our decision on each particular issue (which might be: do nothing).
Here's the current list:

 1. The text-icu package is not part of this proposal, as adding it
would make the platform depend on the ICU C library.
Both the text package and the base package provide Unicode
encoding/decoding functionality. Perhaps some of this functionality
could be merged.
 2. Some functions have similar names to functions in the bytestring
package but have different types (other than ByteString vs Text.)
 3. Some functions have the same type but different names.
 4. Do we need both a strict and lazy version of Text? The strict
version needs one less indirection, can be unpacked in function
arguments and takes less space when stored in data types.

Please be mindful of Bryan's time and try to balance the amount of
work needed to the value of a particular API change.

Cheers,
Johan