Future plans: unicode and line editing

[Don Stewart]

igloo:
> 
> 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!


Can we construct a set of tests that determines if a given line editing
code base works to our satisfaction?

-- Don