Kevin Jardine <kevinjard...@gmail.com> writes: > Hi Don, > > With respect, I disagree with that approach. > > Almost every modern programming language has one or at most two > standard representations for strings.
Almost every modern programming language thinks you can whack a print statement wherever you like... ;-) > That includes PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl and many others. The lack of a > standard text representation in Haskell has created a crazy patchwork > of incompatible libraries requiring explicit and often inefficient > conversions to connect them together. > > I expect Haskell to be higher level than those other languages so that > I can ignore the lower level details and focus on the algorithms. But > in fact the string issue forces me to deal with lower level details > than even PHP requires. I end up with a program littered with ugly > pack, unpack, toString, fromString and similar calls. So, the real issue here is that there is not yet a good abstraction over what we consider to be textual data, and instead people have to code to a specific data type. -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic ivan.miljeno...@gmail.com IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
