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
Andrew Coppin wrote: 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.