On Sat, 2009-04-04 at 12:40 +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> On Saturday 04 April 2009 12:12:52 David Teller wrote:
> > The bad thing is that, whenever you have to return text in an otherwise
> > functional program, you need to enter "mutable array of bytes" land. You
> > can't just assume that the user isn't going to modify that string,
> > because, they can, possibly by accident, and any invariant relying on
> > the fact that your strings can't change are going to be broken. In
> > particular, any StringSet, any StringMap, etc.
> 
> Sure but that is no different to arrays and an ArraySet, ArrayMap etc.

Of course. The thing is that when I'm using arrays, I'm expecting to
enter mutable-land. When I'm manipulating text, most of the time, I
don't.

Cheers,
 David