Re: [Haskell-cafe] The question of ByteString

Tim Chevalier wrote:

I don't think there's a deep theoretical reason why this doesn't exist, but I also don't think it's necessarily *just* a matter of no one having had time yet. As always, there are trade-offs involved, and people try to avoid introducing *too* many special cases into the compiler.

Well, that sounds like a reasonable answer. ByteString is a special case. I'm just wondering how much of it is really specific to the string / binary processing case, and how much of it will generalise to other useful places. ;-) (Mathematicians like to ask "interesting" questions. Unfortunately, at least in mathematics, "interesting" tends to correlate with "this may take several human lifetimes to solve"...)