[erlang-questions] [Erlyaws-list] String Support, The most needed feature

[CyBerHigh]

On 3/3/07, Martin Logan <martinjlogan@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> What exactly did you find so difficult that it was easier to reinvent
> one of the major benefits of Erlang with Python rather than to suffer
> through that element of string handling?
>
> On 3/3/07, CyBerHigh <cyberhigh@REDACTED> wrote:
> > This is my own personal view of erlang.
> >
> > Erlang is going to be left far behind because it is liking only one
> feature,
> > true String support.  All modern languages have an abstraction layer
> over
> > strings except for erlang.  If you want to have a popular language you
> need
> > it.  I love every feature of erlang and its coding style but I hate the
> fact
> > that I cannot handle strings very easly and that strings take up huge
> > amounts of memory.  In fact I was attempting to user erlang for my
> project
> > but found that handling strings was so much work that it was easier to
> use
> > other languages like python with stackless then create my own rcp
> interface.
> >  Which is now pretty similar to erlang without all the nice coding
> styles of
> > erlang.
> >
> > Is there any movement to create a better string interface?  Cause I
> would
> > love to come back to erlang and use it and get the name out there more
> than
> > it is currently but untill there is such a thing I just can't find
> myself
> > using it.
> >
> > Thank you
> > CyberHigh
> >
> >
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>

Python is very good with string.  In fact I enjoy its string syntax more
than perl and other string processing languages.  I am not actually
reinventing anything, stackless offers message passing and microthreads just
like erlang.  I am moving to a more erlang style of code but doing so is not
requiring much work.  I just feel there is no reason why I need to actually
think of a string as a list of characters, unless I am in c.  It is nice
that I don't need to have end of string characters but I feel that elangs
biggest short coming is the fact that strings are not the easiest thing to
handle.  Erlang should be able to act like a string processing language,
offering easy to use things like regular expressions quick split operations
and other nice string tools.  Just seems like that would be a big priority
to be able to compete with all of these new languages popping up and are
started to implement erlang's good things.  Python is even started to get a
on-the-fly programming model which erlang has.  Plus there are tools to be
able to do it in just about any popular language now a days.  So the list of
things that erlang has that others don't is becoming short.  Erlang still
seems to have it implemented better than other languages, but it missing
string handling capability's that other languages do so well that they
almost make up for the erlangs slight betterment of implantation.

Is there something I am missing about erlangs string capability's, or is
there a movement to add better methods to erlang?
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