This commit makes List.split behave a bit more sane and elegantly. Currently split has the following behaviour: 0: split (== ':") "foo" -> ["foo"] 1: split (== ':") ":foo" -> ["", "foo"] 2: split (== ':") "foo:" -> ["foo"] (!!) 3: split (== ':') ":foo:foo" -> ["", "foo", "foo"] 4: split (== ':') ":foo" -> ["", "foo"] 5: split (== ':') "" -> [] (!!) Cases 3 and 5 are the problematic ones. I would think they would result in ["foo", ""] and [""] respectively. This patch gives split this behaviour, it also gives split the nice property that the length of (split ':' str) is (1 + the number of colons in str) I've looked at the uses of split in the prelude and none of them seem to be effected by this change.