On Thu, 2008-02-21 at 13:34 +0100, Henning Thielemann wrote:
I suppose we mean the same. My question is: Why do we use ByteString instead of [Word8] ? Entirely because of efficiency, right? So if we could stick to List code and only convert to ByteString at the end and the compiler all rewrites it to ByteString code, then we would not need libraries that are specialised to ByteString, but they can use [Word8] instead.
Yeah if we could do that it'd be great. I've suggested similar things as extensions of our work on streams. If we know the list is being used fully strictly then we could have replaced it with a stricter data structure. Even if we could do that I'm not sure we'll ever get to the situation where it's fully automatic because some operations on array like things are slower than lists, like consing, so even if we discover that we're using our lists strictly it does not follow that we could get any benefit from converting to arrays. I think we'll be stuck with separate list and stricter array types for some time to come. Duncan