[Haskell-cafe] The question of ByteString

[Andrew Coppin]

Tim Chevalier wrote:
> I don't think there's a deep theoretical reason why this doesn't
> exist, but I also don't think it's necessarily *just* a matter of no
> one having had time yet. As always, there are trade-offs involved, and
> people try to avoid introducing *too* many special cases into the
> compiler.
>   

Well, that sounds like a reasonable answer.

ByteString is a special case. I'm just wondering how much of it is 
really specific to the string / binary processing case, and how much of 
it will generalise to other useful places. ;-)

(Mathematicians like to ask "interesting" questions. Unfortunately, at 
least in mathematics, "interesting" tends to correlate with "this may 
take several human lifetimes to solve"...)