[Haskell-cafe] Clever generic ByteString hack?

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

duncan.coutts:
> On Wed, 2006-07-05 at 05:58 -0500, John Goerzen wrote: 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > In MissingH, I have a bunch of little functions that operate on lists.
> > Some, like uniq (which eliminates duplicate elements in a list), operate
> > on (Eq a => [a]) lists.  Others, like strip (which eliminates whitespace
> > at the start and end), operate on Strings only.
> > 
> > Most functions of both types would be useful on ByteStrings and lazy
> > ByteStrings.  Most of these functions are written in terms of Data.List
> > functions or list primitives that have equivolents in Data.ByteString.
> > 
> > So, my question is: is there a clever hack available to me so that I
> > could have 1 version of each function, and have it work on all three
> > different types of input?  I'd rather avoid having 3 versions, that are
> > exactly the same except for imports.
> 
> People sometimes talk about doing a type class to cover string like
> modules.
> 
> What functions are you thinking of btw? We may want to include them in
> the ByteString modules anyway (possibly directly rather than in terms of
> other functions, to take advantage of tricks with the representation).

Spencer Janssen is actually working on such a class (String) to deal
with this, initially to support [a] and Word8 and Unicode bytestrings, 
as part of his Summer of Code project.

Note also that we have the Foldable and Monoid classes, which support parts of
a String interface.

-- Don