Comments on: First steps with Haskell text API improvement

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:50:27 +0000

Good stuff.

chunksOf :: Int -> [a] -> [[a]]
please.

By: Johan Tibell

Johan Tibell — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:43:29 +0000

I agree with Duncan that a Compat module is unnecessary. The number of modules listed at http://hackage.haskell.org/package/text is already rather intimidating. I also wouldn’t bother with splitChar unless it has serious performance benefits.

I also prefer join to intercalate but I guess that boat already sailed. I don’t remember what the original argument was but if intercalate was chosen over join because of name clashes with monads I think that’s a poor reason since we have namespaces.

A parting comment: Beware of the potential combinatorial explosion that comes from creating a helper function for every common case rather than relying on composition. Haskell’s lack of keyword arguments makes libraries prone to export lots of fooByBar functions for lots of different “Bars”. If lots of possible “configuration” parameters are absolutely needed for a function consider passing them in a record instead of creating separate functions.

By: Stephen Blackheath

Stephen Blackheath — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:48:03 +0000

I second Arthur van Leeuwen’s “dropWhileEnd” suggestion

By: Keith

Keith — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:15:09 +0000

I think chunksOf is generally useful enough to be in Data.List. Is is possible (Haskell’ ?) to add functions like this that turn out to be general enough

By: nbloomf

nbloomf — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:24:36 +0000

IIRC the chunksOf function was implemented as groupBy in “On Lisp”.

By: Greg

Greg — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:13:03 +0000

chunksOf

in Ruby this is Enumerable#each_slice.

# Ruby
(1..10).each_slice(3) {|a| p a} # [1,2,3] …

– Haksell
eachSlice 4 “haskell.org” == ["hask","ell.","org"]

I like chunksOf or groupsOf and slicesOf

By: solrize

solrize — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:30:47 +0000

strip/stripLeft/stripRight are in the spirit of the Python names for those functions, which in turn probably has more in common with Haskell than Perl or Java do. So I’d stay with them.

By: Simon Michael

Simon Michael — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 22:35:58 +0000

I would like to see strip* included. I write these helpers in every haskell project (as strip, lstrip, rstrip).

You didn’t mention the split library on hackage.. did you see it, any more good ideas to be harvested from there ?

Great stuff.

By: Ian Taylor

Ian Taylor — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:42:11 +0000

‘trimLeft’, ‘trimRight’, ‘trim’ sound good to me.

I always liked the sound of ‘join’ when dealing with text rather than ‘intercalate’. It goes well with split.

By: brian

brian — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 16:14:37 +0000

stripLeft and stripRight seem fine to me. If they were named stripStart and stripEnd, I’d agree that they were badly named because of the language issue.