Lambda the Ultimate

Doing computational linguistics, I've passed through several languages and settled on Python as the most convenient thing so far for text processing. I've also read a lot about the attractions of functional programming and have wanted to try applying it to my own work.

However, whenever I see FP application to things like string manipulation and regexes (e.g. in Haskell), it seems horribly messy to me, done just to show that it can be, not because it's a good idea.

Am I the victim of bad examples or is text processing something that just shouldn't be done with a functional language?

[As seen on comp.lang.scheme]

I think the rationale is that Forth comes on controllers, but you might want to do some metaprogramming, so put the 2 together.

[edit: fixed hyperlink]