| My preference for functional string processing is, as I said,
substrings.
| They are convenient, and encapsulate the index manipulations in the
data
| type. I'm almost certain you've seen them, what's your issue?

None whatsoever. I'm perfectly willing to believe that some variant
of character arrays is the best string representation. (Provided
they are immutable!)

But for the relatively trivial string manipulations that I (and
quite possibly many other OCaml users) care about, lists of
characters are very convenient and perfectly adequate. So I don't
feel your hyperbolic dismissals of such a representation as
"dumb" and "ridiculous" are justified. You could say that with
equal force about any use of lists instead of arrays, and I'm
sure there are plenty of programmers who would.

John.