On 9/15/06, Lennart Augustsson
It's hard to tell what the best representation is if you don't know what the operations that you are going to perform are. If all you are going to do is I/O of bitstrings, then [Bool] could be great. If you need to do bitwise boolean ops then Integer is a wise choice.
And is I/O of bitstring represented as Integer going to be significantly worse [Bool]? It is certainly a much denser representation. Actually the main operations are probably tests (is a certain bit set), and encoding and decoding (to and from BER, PER, etc). The operations that need to be efficient are: -- test to see if the Nth bit is set testBit :: BitString -> Integer -> Bool -- set the Nth bit setBit :: BitString -> Integer -> BitString -- clear the Nth bit clearBit :: BitString -> Integer -> BitString I can see the potential for creating large intermediate Integers (i.e. 1 `shift` n), if the number of bits is large. T.