[Haskell-cafe] Fun with ByteStrings [was: A very edgy language]

[Andrew Coppin]

Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Hello Andrew,
>
> Sunday, July 8, 2007, 9:38:18 PM, you wrote:
>   
>> (E.g., the inverse BWT makes use of positive integers that are likely to
>> be way bigger than 255. But there isn't a fast packed Word16 or Word32
>> array I can use there...)
>>     
>
> well, that's true as long as you swear to never use UArray :))
>   

OTOH, everybody uses ByteString rather than UArray Word8. (And, in fact, 
ByteString *exists* even though UArray Word8 was there first.) So one 
presumes it's because ByteString has some kind of magic that makes it 
faster than a UArray...