Ivan Miljenovic wrote:
Johan Tibell wrote:
A sequence of bytes is not the same thing as a sequence of Unicode code points. If you want to replace String by something more efficient have a look at Data.Text.
Though Data.Text still has the disadvantage of not being as nice to deal with as String, since you can't pattern match on it, etc.
Whilst it may degrade performance, treating String as a list of characters rather than an array provides you with greater flexibility of how to deal with it.
Indeed. In particular, [Char] and Data.Text.Text have different semantics and performance. For instance, cons :: Char -> Text -> Text is O(n) whereas (:) is O(1). (Not sure whether stream fusion for cons can change that at times.) Furthermore, certain programs relying on laziness, like ahh = 'a' : ahh fibs = ' ' : zipWith plus fibs (tail fibs) where plus x y = toEnum $ fromEnum x + fromEnum y are not possible with Data.Text.Text . (Whether you really need these is another question, of course.) Regards, Heinrich Apfelmus -- http://apfelmus.nfshost.com