[Haskell-cafe] Unicode: Hugs vs GHC (again) was: Re: Some random newbie questions

[Simon Marlow]

On 07 January 2005 13:01, Dimitry Golubovsky wrote:

> Lennart Augustsson wrote:
>> Simon Marlow wrote:
>> 
>>> Here's a summary of the state of Unicode support in GHC and other
>>> compilers.  There are several aspects:
>>> 
>>>  - Can the Char type hold the full range of Unicode characters?
>>>    This has been true in GHC for some time, and is now true in Hugs.
>>>    I don't think it's true in nhc98 (please correct me if I'm
>>> wrong). 
> 
> I remember, it was in GHC. But any attempt to output Unicode
> characters using standard I/O functions always ended up outputting
> only low 8 bits. Has anything changed since then?

No, that's still the case (I mentioned it in a separate point in that
message).
 
>>>  - Do the character class functions (isUpper, isAlpha etc.) work
>>>    correctly on the full range of Unicode characters?  This is true
>>>    in Hugs.  It's true with GHC on some systems (basically we were
>>>    lazy and used the underlying C library's support here, which is
>>> patchy). 
> 
> Which basically means that one with older or underconfigured system
> where they do not have permissions/technical possibilities to
> configure locales in the C library properly is out of luck...

True.  Anyone care to take Hugs' implementation of the character class
functions and put it in GHC?

> The reason I asked this question was: I am trying to understand, where
> is internationalization of Haskell compilers on their developers' list
> of priorities, and also how high is demand from users to have at least
> basic internationalization.

We're keen to have it.  The more people that complain about the lack of
it, the faster it'll get done, probably :-)

Cheers,
	Simon