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I'm sure that very smart people have risen to the challenge of supporting strings in Haskell, and it is therefore possible for a sufficiently motivated user to
by HelloNurse 6y ago
I'm sure that very smart people have risen to the challenge of supporting strings in Haskell, and it is therefore possible for a sufficiently motivated user to process text decently after all.
But the problem is that strings must be a built-in feature in any programming language that wants to be taken seriously (with an exemption for specialized ones that don't need strings, like GLSL). What would you think of a hotel that doesn't have mattresses but allows guests to bring their own?
- tome 6y agoHuh, the problem isn't that people have made their own. The string types are all in the standard "boot" packages. The problem is that there is one that is obsolete from another era (String) and four usable ones, each combination of strict/lazy and Unicode/Bytes. Haskell gets twice as many as Python (say) because of the desire to have strict and lazy versions.
- HelloNurse 6y agoLanguages are judged by their standard library, and standard Haskell strings are part of the problem and not part of the solution. Multiple moderately bad string types, with strict typing that exacerbates interoperability problems, are worse than one really bad string type (like char pointers in C) or nothing at all.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoCan it be worse than Microsoft's hatful of incompatible strings? You change the default string type, you have to change code. Gah.