To show or not to show french accents

[Simon Marlow]

This discussion is getting a little out of hand ;-)

An instance of Show should (but doessn't have to):

  - generate a rendering of its argument as a String that
	(a) follows the Haskell lexical syntax, and
	(b) with an appropriate instance of Read can reconstruct the
	    original value.

  - generate human-parseable output as far as possible.

there are numerous holes and points to discuss here, but that would be
more on-topic for the Haskell mailing list.

The issue here is whether show on characters should render non-ASCII
characters using an escape sequence.  Doing so is clearly fine, because
it is still in the Haskell lexical syntax, but it would also be fine
(and possibly better) to render any character that is allowed unescape
in the lexical syntax, literally (i.e. any character that is in
'graphic' or 'space' in the lexical syntax).

Nevertheless, Haskell 98 specifies the use of escapes for characters
>127, so our hands are tied anyway.

Cheers,
	Simon