6.12.1rc1: non-Latin filenames in GHCi

[Simon Marlow]

On 18/10/2009 20:15, Chryssochoidis Christos wrote:
> Thanks Don for your reply.
> I may have overlooked something in the blog post you gave, but my
> understanding is that it talks about the user's input/output to and from
> GHCi and the file system. The user IO with non-Latin chars seems to work
> fine in GHC 6.12.1; e.g.:
>
>>
>> *Main> putStrLn "πρόχειρον.hs"
>> πρόχειρον.hs
>
>> *Main> getLine >>= putStrLn
>> πρόχειρον.hs
>> πρόχειρον.hs
>> *Main>
>
> It's only when GHCi attempts to print a diagnostic message containing a
> filename with non-Latin chars that the garbling occurs:
>
>> *Main> :load πρόχειρον.hs
>> [1 of 1] Compiling Main ( πρόχειρον.hs, interpreted )
>>
>> πρόχειρον.hs:1:23:
>> Not in scope: type constructor or class `Boo'
>> Failed, modules loaded: none.
>> Prelude>
>
> It would be nice if the error messages at least showed correctly the
> filename.
>
> Maybe this has something to do with Haskeline?

It's not to do with Haskeline.  The real underlying problem is that our 
filesystem APIs on Unix interpret FilePath as [Word8] without doing any 
encoding/decoding; they just strip off all but the low 8 bits of each 
Char.  This is a long-standing problem, and won't be solved properly 
until we switch to an abstract FilePath type, but that's a big change 
that will break lots of code.

Lots more good discussion here:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/3456

If there were a filePathToString function we could use it in GHC to fix 
the above glitch.

Cheers,
	Simon