[Haskell-cafe] Re: String vs ByteString

[Andrew Coppin]

Ivan Lazar Miljenovic wrote:
> Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> writes:
>   
>
>> More importantly: How does the average random Haskeller discover that
>> a package has become available that might be relevant to their work?
>>     
>
> Look on Hackage; subscribe to mailing lists (where package maintainers
> should really write announcement emails), etc.
>   

OK. I guess I must have missed that one...

> It's rather surprising you haven't heard of text: it is for benchmarking
> this that Bryan wrote criterion; there's emails on -cafe and blog posts
> that mention it on a semi-regular basis, etc.
>   

Well, I suppose I don't do a lot of text processing work... If all 
you're trying to do is parse commands from an interactive terminal 
prompt, [Char] is probably good enough.

(What I do do is process big chunks of binary data - which is what 
ByteString is intended for.)