Future plans: unicode and line editing

[Ian Lynagh]

Hi all,

We've been weighing up the options to solve the recent problems that
editline has given us, and we think that this is the best way forward:

For 6.12:

* http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2811
  Implement unicode support for text I/O
  (we've had this on the TODO list for some time now; it was slated for
  6.10, but didn't make it)

* http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2812
  Switch to using haskeline instead of editline
  Haskeline should be able to use the above unicode support, rather than
  the utf8-string package

* http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/2813
  Create (and ship with GHC) a utf8 bytestring-a-like
  I'm not sure if this is actually needed by either of the above, but it
  is certainly related, and something we want to do anyway


We won't be trying to get any of the above into future 6.10 releases.
However, for 6.10 you can use Judah's ghci-haskeline:
    http://code.haskell.org/~judah/ghci-haskeline/
which uses the GHC API and the haskeline package to implement the GHCi
frontend.

If you have any problems using ghci-haskeline, then it is likely that
GHCi in 6.12 will have the same problems, so please let us know!


Comments and criticisms welcomed!


Thanks
Ian