Here at Haskell.org we know you have a choice in programming languages, and a choice in evaluation strategies. To help make your decision easier, I'm pleased to announce an update to the 'strict' package providing strict file IO for Strings. You can now choose when and where to evaluate your Strings, meaning more predictable resource usage for readFile-like Strict IO. And of course you can still use lazy IO when appropriate. Find the strict IO package in System.IO.Strict, on hackage: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/strict Cheers, Don