On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 10:07 PM, Donn Cave <donn@avvanta.com> wrote:

Am I confused about this? It's why I can't see Text ever being

simply the obvious choice. [Char] will continue to be the obvious
choice if you want a functional data type that supports pattern
matching etc.

Actually, with view patterns, Text is pretty nice to pattern match against:

foo (uncons -> Just (c,cs)) = "whee"

despam (prefixed "spam" -> Just suffix) = "whee" `mappend` suffix

ByteString will continue to be the obvious choice
for big data loads.

Don't confuse "I have big data" with "I need bytes". If you are working with bytes, use bytestring. If you are working with text, outside of a few narrow domains you should use text.

We'll have a three way choice between programming
elegance, correctness and efficiency. If Haskell were more than
just a research language, this might be its most prominent open
sore, don't you think?

No, that's just FUD.