Why are strings linked lists?

[ajb at spamcop.net]

G'day all.

Quoting John Meacham <john at repetae.net>:

> Something I'd like to see (perhaps a bit less
> drastic) would be a String class, similar to Num so string constants
> would have type
> String a => a

Interesting that you mention this.  I've also been thinking about this
lately in the context of the discussion on collections and the left-fold
combinator both here and on LtU.  When people say "I want String to be
[Char]", what I'm actually hearing is "I want String to be a collection
of Char".  I may be mishearing.

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage