In general only specific *code* can be compiled more efficiently.
I disagree - If GHC optimised as much as is _possible_ the code would be as fast and use as little memory as hand coded 'C'
It can't be transparent. A different type for semi-packed strings,
Again I disagree... I dont see why you cannot change the "implementation" of lists without changing the "interface"... Good old lists will behave like good old lists - just the implementation would try and take advantage of blocking of the data wherever possible. Perhaps a pragma to change the implementation of lists would ne be a sensible way of selecting the implementation. If a clever way of encoding the node-size (for large cells) is used, then it would be no slower than normal list code... One way of doing this would be to only change the format of cells where the next link is null (IE the end of the list)... In this case normal cells would be encoded _exactly_ as they are at the moment (so no slowdown or increase in memory usage) - to encode a large cell, the next pointer is null, and then an extra data structure determines if this really is the end of the list, or if infact it is a large cell (so we need an item count, and a _real_ next cell link, plus the data block) Keean.