| > Haskell treats strings as lists of chars by default.
|
| Just goes to show you that even really smart people can do some
amazingly
| dumb things.

That's far too categorical; opinions differ on this subject. I'd be
quite
happy with strings as lists of characters, and I consider OCaml's
mutable
strings a far worse design error.

And yes, I use "implode" and "explode" all the time, because lists of
characters are often simple and convenient to deal with in a functional
style, and string manipulations are almost never performance-critical
in the kind of code I write.

John.