[Haskell-cafe] invalid character encoding

[Wolfgang Thaller]

> If you try to pretend that I18N comes down to shoe-horning everything
> into Unicode, you will turn the language into a joke.

How common will those problems you are describing be by the time this 
has been implemented?
How common are they even now?
I haven't yet encountered a unix box where the file names were not in 
the system locale encoding. On all reasonably up-to-date Linux boxes 
that I've seen recently, they were in UTF-8 (and the system locale 
agreed).
On both Windows and Mac OS X, filenames are stored in Unicode, so it is 
always possible to convert them to unicode.
So we can't do Unicode-based I18N because there exist a few unix 
systems with messed-up file systems?

> Haskell's Unicode support is a joke because the API designers tried to
> avoid the issues related to encoding with wishful thinking (i.e. you
> open a file and you magically get Unicode characters out of it).

OK, that part is purely wishful thinking, but assuming that filenames 
are text that can be represented in Unicode is wishful thinking that 
corresponds to 99% of reality. So why can't the remaining 1 percent of 
reality be fixed instead?

Cheers,

Wolfgang