[Haskell-cafe] Bytestrings and [Char]

[Johann Höchtl]

On 22.03.2010 14:15, Ivan Miljenovic wrote:
> On 23 March 2010 00:10, Johan Tibell<johan.tibell at gmail.com>  wrote:
>    
>> A sequence of bytes is not the same thing as a sequence of Unicode
>> code points. If you want to replace String by something more efficient
>> have a look at Data.Text.
>>      
> Though Data.Text still has the disadvantage of not being as nice to
> deal with as String, since you can't pattern match on it, etc.
>
> Whilst it may degrade performance, treating String as a list of
> characters rather than an array provides you with greater flexibility
> of how to deal with it.
>
>    
But doesn't this basically mean sacrifice performance / applicability 
for algorithmic beauty? Sure, pattern match comes in handy, but in the 
case of strings at a high price