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

[Aaron Denney]

On 2005-01-10, Simon Marlow <simonmar at microsoft.com> wrote:
>>>  - Can you do String I/O in some encoding of Unicode?  No Haskell
>>>    compiler has support for this yet, and there are design decisions
>>>    to be made.  Some progress has been made on an experimental
>>>    prototype (see recent discussion on this list).
>> 
>> Many of the easy ways to do this that I've heard proposed make the
>> current hacks for binary IO fail.
>
> Making hacks fail isn't necessarily a bad thing :-)

True, but making the tasks the hacks enable impossible (sans FFI) is.
And doing that myself involves rewrapping stdio and networking.

> I'm not keen to provide binary IO on top of the existing IO library, and
> then to have Unicode as a layer on top of that.  Performance will be
> terrible.  It needs to be designed properly from the ground up.

Agreed.  I was thinking in the end binary IO as the base and both the
current standard and some unicode on top of that, though even that might
be unwieldy.

> Not a problem.  Have you looked at the streams proposal?

I took a brief look a while back.  I don't have much time to hack
on anything these days, and nothing stood out as being obviously
horrible.  I'll take another look.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-