--- Ketil Malde wrote: Or, what if String were one? Could we have painless read/show with arrays of Char, as well as lists, for instance? --- end of quote --- I think with a decent set of type classes for collections, better handling of strings would come for free. If any list function could be made implementation independent, then strings could still be treated as lists of chars, but the underlying implementation could be completely different (arrays, PackedStrings, etc.) /gXm