[Haskell-cafe] Strings in Haskell

[Alexy Khrabrov]

Greetings -- I'm looking at several FP languages for data mining, and
was annoyed to learn that Erlang represents each character as 8 BYTES
in a string which is just a list of characters.  Now I'm reading a
Haskell book which states the same.  Is there a more efficient Haskell
string-handling method?  Which functional language is the most
suitable for text processing?

Cheers,
Alexy