On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 6:54 PM, Henrik Nilsson <n...@cs.nott.ac.uk> wrote:
> In any case, this is hardly the place to to discuss how to best > teach Haskell or programming in general. Sure, I haven't seen any disagreement with that. Note however that the "pedagogical" arguments was brought in as support for the [Char] definition. It is only natural that it being challenged on that ground. > Nor is the Haskell standard a vehicle to prescribe how Haskell > should be taught or for what reasons Haskell should be taught: I have not seen any assertion to that effect. > that can only be decided by individual educators based in their > experience and given a specific teaching context. True, but should the language definition default to a string type that is one the most unsuited for text processing in the 21st century where global multilingualism abounds? Even C has qualms about that. > Given intimate knowledge of our specific teaching context > here at Nottingham, I can say that removing String = [Char] > from the language wouldn't be helpful to us. I have no doubt believing that if all texts my students have to process are US ASCII, [Char] is more than sufficient. So, I have sympathy for your position. However, I doubt [Char] would be adequate if I ask them to shared texts from their diverse cultures. Should the language definition make it much harder to share such experience in classroom when the primary argument for [Char] is pedagogy? -- Gaby _______________________________________________ Haskell-prime mailing list Haskell-prime@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-prime