[Haskell-cafe] Re: File path programme

[Aaron Denney]

On 2005-01-30, Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk <qrczak at knm.org.pl> wrote:
> Aaron Denney <wnoise at ofb.net> writes:
>
>>> It provides variants of UTF-16/32 with and without a BOM, but
>>> UTF-8 only has the variant with a BOM. This makes UTF-8 a stateful
>>> encoding.
>>
>> I think you mean "UTF-8 only has the variant without a BOM".

...

> IMHO it would be fair if it had two variants of UTF-8 encoding scheme,
> just like it has three variants of UTF-16/32, so it would be unambiguous
> whether "UTF-8" in a particular context allows BOM or not.

Ah.  Okay.  It's not that the BOM is always to be there, but that
it's always ambiguous, which was not clear from your initial
description.

Better yet would be to have the standard never allow the BOM.

Since some things can't handle it, on output we should never emit it,
but still must handle it on input.  Bah.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-