Proposal: unsnoc, unsafeInit and unsafeLast for the bytestring library

[Ben Millwood]

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 2:50 PM, Simon Meier <iridcode at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2012/4/3 Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at googlemail.com>:
>>
>> 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.
>
> I agree. I don't see a usecase for unsnoc on lazy bytestrings in
> production code.
>
> It nevertheless might make sense to provide it for one-off scripting
> code and for interface consistency. The necessarily bad implementation
> shows in the runtime given in the comment. Hence, I'd marginally vote
> for inclusion of the lazy bytestring unsnoc.

Agreed on the interface consistency comment; also it's worth
remembering that what type of bytestring you use is sometimes the
choice of the library you want to work with, rather than yours :)

An explicit warning in the docs, maybe, but keep it in there nonetheless.

yrs,
Ben