[Haskell-cafe] Bytestrings and [Char]

Hello, I was recentyl playing with Haskell (GHC that is) IO and text processing. Bytestrings and Lazy Bytestrings allow for fast and memory eficient string (well, bytestring) handling, yet a lot of libraries do not support them (yet) Given the incredibly inneficient memory representation of [Char] (16 bytes? per cell) I wonder wheather String should default to lazy batestring altogether instead of [Char]. The levenshtein distance as is on hackage uses e.g. String ([Char]) and as such is unneccessarily slow. My question or discussion point: Why not depreciate [Char] altogether and favour of lazy Bytestrings? Regards, Johann