Crazy suggestion for dealing with the naming disaster that is ByteString

[Aloïs Cochard]

Hi,

Why do you think ByteString should be named Bytes?

Maybe I missed it but I don't see any motivation for the rename. I don't
see what is wrong with the current name.

Thanks

On 28 Jan 2018 12:27, "Merijn Verstraaten" <merijn at inconsistent.nl> wrote:

> Ok, so every so often I've seen people bring up that we really should've
> called ByteString type Bytes to avoid a whole lot of newbie confusion, but
> we can't change it now, because it'd break everything.
>
> But would it really break everything? What's to stop us from creating a
> new package "bytes" which is just a copy of the bytestring source with
> ByteString renamed to Bytes, then turning the bytestring package into a
> shim that re-exports all of the bytes package with an added type alias
> "type ByteString = Bytes".
>
> Anything depending on bytestring right now should just compile as is.
> Sure, we'd probably be stuck with bytestring as shim package for the next
> 10 years or so while the ecosystem slowly transitions to "bytes", but
> maintaining a shim package like that should be near zero work and we'd
> avoid being stuck with this terribly misleading name forever.
>
> Cheers,
> Merijn
>
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