On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 11:14 AM, David Rajchenbach-Teller <David.Teller@ens-lyon.org> wrote:

I personally can't remember the last time I've needed mutable strings in
OCaml.

Neither do I.

On the other hand, I can remember a handful of times where, to
return a constant string, I had to make a function that would rebuild
the string at every call. Which is both needlessly slow and awkward for
what looks like a constant.

I think providing both capabilities is the best solution.
However, let's study Haskell's strings.
They simply are a list of characters. This let the ability to use heavily list-related functions (take, takeWhile, drop, dropWhile, map, etc.). On the other hand, OCaml's standard library lacks of many functions for strings ! I think this is too much imperative oriented. Maybe we could try to implement (for Batteries or in a separate project) string lists and then use the power of Batteries' list module with many (really many... that's a real pleasure to read its documentation) functions to work with. I think with a bit of internal laziness, we could get a great immutable string type with many functions to manipulate it.

But I guess there are many cons to do so, otherwise it would have been "standardized".

--
Alp Mestan