[mike_hearn]

Thanks.

By "should the types be lazy or strict", you mean, if you do a string operation like uppercase/lowercase/substring/replace/etc, is that operation lazy or strict? Or are you meaning decoding bytes to characters or ... what aspect of the type itself can be lazy or strict?

[michael_007]

Yes, the issue is whether the various string operations are lazy or strict. But whether it's possible to implement lazy operations does depend on the type itself. If the type is implemented as just an array of bytes in memory, it would be impossible to do anything lazily, because there's nowhere to store thunks (unevaluated values), only data.