I'm reading Learn You a Haskell and I'm wondering why so many things are acting like a list, and nothing in the Prelude is using the native facility of type classes to set this up:
"The bytestring version of : is called cons It takes a byte and a bytestring and puts the byte at the beginning. It's lazy though, so it will make a new chunk even if the first chunk in the bytestring isn't full. That's why it's better to use the strict version of cons, cons' if you're going to be inserting a lot of bytes at the beginning of a bytestring."
Why isn't there a TypeClass listable or something that offers the : function to unify Data.ByteString, Data.List, Data.ByteString.Lazy, etc? Is there a reason for this, or is this just an element of legacy Haskell? Using : as an example is kind of an understatement, also from LYAH:
Otherwise, the bytestring modules have a load of functions that are analogous to those in Data.List, including, but not limited to, head, tail, init, null, length, map, reverse, foldl, foldr, concat, takeWhile, filter, etc.