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

[David Roundy]

On Sat, Jan 08, 2005 at 08:08:38AM +0000, Aaron Denney wrote:
> I suppose I wouldn't be too upset at using the locale information, but
> defaulting to UTF-8, rather than ASCII for unset character set
> information.

But if we default to a UTF-8 encoding, then there could be decoding
failures when attempting to read a file.  You have to consider both the
possibility that characters aren't expressible in a given encoding and the
possibility that files aren't expressible in a given encoding.  ASCII (or
iso-whatever) has the advantage that at least every file is readable.

But as you say, really what we need is a binary IO system first, and then
the character-based IO can do whatever it likes without breaking things
(since it'll only be used by programs that actually want unicode coding).
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net