I feel a bit guilty for my ugly wc implementation. At the moment of writing the first version I was thinking only about efficiency, not about elegance. [..] We have already created on this list a version which is fast and quite elegant at the same time, and I feel this one is better for the shootout even if it's slower than the one currently used (but it doesn't use unsafeRead). The good news is that the development GHC 6.3 compiles this to code which is almost as fast as the ugly one.
I agree; the code should look reasonable - this will be many people's first sight of Haskell code.
Count me as a vote for the better-but-slightly-slower wc.
--KW 8-)
--
Keith Wansbrough