Re: Guile: What's wrong with this?

[Ian Price <ianprice90@googlemail.com>]

Bruce Korb <bkorb@gnu.org> writes:

> On 01/04/12 04:19, Ian Price wrote:
>> ...  As for mutable strings, I consider them
>> a mistake to begin with,...
>
> Let's step back and consider the whole point of Guile in the first place.
This was not intended as an answer to this question, nor to be
representative of the guile developers / users / what-have-you, but a
personal opinion.

> So my main question is:
>
>   Which is the higher priority, language purity or ease of use?
That is a loaded question, as it presupposes ease of use is always the
same thing as impurity e.g. A zipper is just as usable IMO as a gap
buffer, and doesn't require mutability.

My opinion of mutable strings is that they have little practical use to
me in my day to day programming, frankly I can count the number of times
I've done it in any high level language (so not C etc) over the past 4
or so years on one hand, and I consider most of those uses mistaken in
hindsight. It isn't just functional programming types who care about
this, Python is a great example of a language which has not been
hindered by immutable strings.

The most common string operations in practice (for me) are
concatenation, substrings, comparison/searching, and iteration, and I
would think a better foundation for strings could be found by starting
there rather than with the premise that strings are basically a specific
type of vector.

And again, just to be clear, I'm not making a proposal, just stating an
opinion.

-- 
Ian Price

"Programming is like pinball. The reward for doing it well is
the opportunity to do it again" - from "The Wizardy Compiled"