[Haskell-cafe] Re: String vs ByteString

[Edward Z. Yang]

Excerpts from Kevin Jardine's message of Fri Aug 13 16:37:14 -0400 2010:
> I find it disturbing that a modern programming language like Haskell
> still apparently forces you to choose between a representation for
> "mostly ASCII text" and Unicode.
> 
> Surely efficient Unicode text should always be the default? And if the
> Unicode format used by the Text library is not efficient enough then
> can't that be fixed?

For what it's worth, Java uses UTF-16 representation internally for
strings, and thus also wastes space.

There is something to be said for UTF-8 in-memory representation, but
it takes a lot of care.  A newtype for dirty and clean UTF-8 may come
in handy.

Cheers,
Edward