[Haskell-cafe] Re: HDBC, character encoding

[Peter Gammie]

On 04/04/2008, at 9:27 PM, John Goerzen wrote:
>
> I can see this being a performance and ease-of-use win in some
> situations.  I don't think it's an actual feature difference, though.
> If you can represent it as a [Word8], you can represent it as a
> [Char], and it will be converted to the same underlying data for the
> trip through FFI.

Sure. I prefer to keep things separate: Char is for Unicode  
characters, [Word8]/ByteString is for concrete representations. It's  
more about type safety than efficiency.

cheers
peter