Can we all agree that * Text can now demonstrate both CPU and RAM performance improvements in benchmarks. Because Text is an opaque type it has a maximum potential for future performance improvements. Declaring a String to be a list limits performance improvements * In a Unicode world, String = [Char] is not always correct: instead for some operations one must operate on the String as a whole. Using a [Char] type makes it much more likely for a programmer to mistakenly operate on individual characters. Using a Text type allows us to choose to not expose character manipulation functions. * The usage of String in the base libraries will continue as long as Text is not in the language standard. This will continue to make writing Haskell code a greater chore than is necessary: converting between types, and working around the inconvenience of defining typeclasses that operate on both String and [].
These are important enough to *try* to include Text into the standard, even if there are objections to how it might practically be included. _______________________________________________ Haskell-prime mailing list Haskell-prime@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime
