Proposal: unsnoc, unsafeInit and unsafeLast for the bytestring library

[Duncan Coutts]

On 3 April 2012 13:35, Simon Meier <iridcode at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Mikhail,
>
> I've never used these functions in my code. So I cannot judge their
> usefulness. Having inspected your patch, I see the following points
> for optimization:

> 3. The implementation of Data.ByteString.Lazy.unsnoc is too strict in
> my opinion. I would expect it to return 'Just
> <combined-init-and-last-computation>', as soon as it has proven that
> the ByteString is non-empty. To avoid unnecessary code duplication, it
> might make sense to inline only the wrapper and let GHC decide what it
> wants to do for the actual worker.

Actually, I think it doesn't make sense to provdide unsnoc for lazy
bytestring at all. It's a bit of a silly operation for lazy
bytestrings for the same reason as for lists. It's reasonable for
strict bytestrings because you have the same access to the end of the
string as the beginning, but the same is not true of lazy bytestrings.

Duncan