JavaScript
> "" == []
true
wat
Haskell
> "" == []
True
Well, that makes sense.
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Took me a minute or two!
Technically these are both string coercion?
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No, in Haskell strings are represented as lists of characters. This was cute at the time it was designed, but horrible in the current world of Unicode. Also terrible for performance. Thankfully you can now use a better representation via the Text package.
Yes, that’s what I said.
“List a” is “co-erced” into “List Char”
For a fuzzy definition of coerce.
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Oh.... hmmm. Would be a pretty funny definition of coerce. It's probably better to think of it as "the compiler deduces `[] :: List Char` based on how it is used in conjunction with `("" ==)`". Thought the original post was amusing despite that though!
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Do you still have to enable OverloadedStrings to make string literals not terrible?
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Yup, that's correct!
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String actually turns out to be an amazingly good representation for text in many situations, though with multi codepoint glyphs like some emojis we’re missing a few algorithms we need like proper reversing instead of just list reverse. Definitely slow and inefficient though
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It's actually fine for Unicode, terrible for performance though. The text package helps but not completely.
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Strings are lists of unicode codepoints! So it isn't actually _that_ horrible even in unicodeworld, just inefficient.
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