[Ocaml-lib-devel] [Fwd: Re: [Caml-list] Strings as arrays or lists...]

[fva <fv...@ts...>]

  OOps! I guess X. Leroy is giving a strong hint *against* inefficient 
code in the ExtLib... Anybody else reads it likewise?

Regards,

        Fran Valverde

> > in Haskell, strings are lists of chars.
> 
> And what a horrible design decision that is!

Agreed.  

Actually, the list representation of strings is so repugnant that I
don't even want to include "explode" and "implode" coercions between
string and char list in the standard library.  A standard library
should steer users away from algorithmically-inefficient code.  By not
having implode and explode in the library, I hope OCaml programmers
will come to the realization that the proper way to operate on strings
is either via block operations (the String module, regexps, etc), or
by recursion on integer indices.

- Xavier Leroy