Andrew Coppin wrote:
Duncan Coutts wrote:
Yes, the semantics are different. ByteString is stricter. In some
circumstances you could discover that some list is being used
sufficiently strictly (spine and element strict) that you could do a
representation change to use strict arrays. It is something I have
pondered occasionally and I think that is an interesting avenue for
research.
Also important is the fact that String = [Char], and a Char can hold any
Unicode character, whereas a ByteString is a sequence of Word8 elements
(i.e. integers from 0-255). If you want to store a Char in a ByteString
then you have to convert it to UTF-8 or something similar.
The Encoding package
(http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/encoding-0.2)
has the functions for this kind of thing.
Paul.
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