[Haskell-cafe] Clever generic ByteString hack?

[John Goerzen]

On Wed, Jul 05, 2006 at 09:38:44PM +1000, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> > What functions are you thinking of btw? We may want to include them in
> > the ByteString modules anyway (possibly directly rather than in terms of
> > other functions, to take advantage of tricks with the representation).
> 
> Spencer Janssen is actually working on such a class (String) to deal
> with this, initially to support [a] and Word8 and Unicode bytestrings, 
> as part of his Summer of Code project.

That's nice, but that sounds different.  I'm specifically wanting
support for the ByteString and lazy ByteString types.  Also, it sounds
like he would have to re-implement some of the functions you already
have in ByteString.

> Note also that we have the Foldable and Monoid classes, which support parts of
> a String interface.