[Haskell-cafe] Type system madness

[Andrew Coppin]

Jonathan Cast wrote:
> On Tuesday 10 July 2007, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>   
>> Wait... I thought Unicode was still an experimental prototype? Since
>> when does it work in the real world??
>>     
>
> Are you serious?  Unicode has been a (more-or-less) working reality on Linux 
> for several years now. . .
>   

Last time I looked, everything treats "text" as being 8 bits per 
character. (Or, more commonly, 7, and if the MSB isn't 0, weird things 
happen...) That's why (for example) HTML has lots of weird constructs 
such as "…" in it, instead of just typing in the actual character 
you want. (And let's be clear here: SGML and all those decendents are 
all using "<" and ">" - the mathematical greater and less operations - 
when what they *really* mean are angle brackets, a quite distinct 
glyph.) Last time I checked, nobody was keen on using 64 bits per 
character...

>> ...so the 's' doesn't really "exist", it's just random hackery of the
>> type system to implement uniqueness?
>>     
>
> Exactly.
>   

Hmm. Like the IO monad's RealWorld object, which isn't really there?

Say, maybe what this means is that in fact there IS no spoon, and it is 
really YOU that bends? (Or at least, your mind...)