[Haskell-cafe] Strings in Haskell

[John Meacham]

On Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 09:37:21PM -0500, Bryan Donlan wrote:
> Or you can get the best of both worlds by using Data.ByteString.Lazy :)
> Even with laziness, all the indirections that String causes hurts 
> performance.

actually, strictness analysis is really good at unboxing things like
this, so the indirections probably hurt less than one would initially
think. I think the main issue with string processing speed is not so
much the representation of characters, it is that the natural way to
express algorithms in haskell is always a character at a time, rather
than working on chunks of text at once. of course, Data.ByteStream can
let you do this too, but you start to diverge from idiomatic haskell.
Not that that is inherently the case forever.

        John


-- 
John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈