[Haskell-cafe] Interesting folds over bytestring lists?

[Justin Bailey]

On 9/20/07, Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> A lazy bytestring is a list of strict bytestring which externally looks like one
> big string. Could you not just use a lazy bytestring and it's take and drop
> functions? Perhaps you can help me understand what it is you're trying to do?

I'm working on the ICFP contest from this year, and the algorithm
frequently prepends long strings to the front of the "DNA" string
being processed. I originally worked only with a lazy bytestring but
it 'append' wasn't fast enough, so I'm trying this representation.

Your email makes me think I should work directly with a list of strict
bytestrings, but in that case what happens when I want to take a large
chunk of strings out of the middle of the list? Would that be an O(n)
operation?

Justin