I suspected in my sleepy state last night that overwriting all instances of my original patch with this new one would probably come back to bite me. I probably shouldn't have ignored that gut instinct. Thanks for the rant, Duncan. That clears up a bunch of things for me regarding how ByteStrings are intended to be used. I had written the original patch with lazy bytestrings because I had integration with Data.Binary in mind and wanted to make it as simple for that as possible. But I do see the merit in your argument for just using strict ByteStrings; it didn't feel quite right making trivial conversions between strict and lazy bytestrings when I was doing it. So then. If I revert to a patch similar to the one I originally had only using strict ByteStrings would it raise any further concerns (besides out-of-scope concerns such as a nice coherent string class interface). -- Robert Marlow MITS Co-operative Limited http://www.mits.coop/