[Haskell-cafe] Type system madness

[Andrew Coppin]

Albert Y. C. Lai wrote:
> Andrew Coppin wrote:
>> Wait... I thought Unicode was still an experimental prototype? Since 
>> when does it work in the real world??
>
> That myth is as old as "Haskell is an experimental prototype". "Old" 
> as in "that's an old one".
>
> Windows has been well supporting Unicode since 2000. That is pretty 
> much of the real world.
>
> The only reason you see α as the Greek letter alpha and not scrambled 
> code is that I send it as Unicode and your Windows and Thunderbird 
> also support Unicode and therefore they display it to you properly.
>
> The whole scheme works so well and so transparently that you didn't 
> even notice it.
>
> "No one notices when things are right."

That is, indeed, impressive.

> Alex Queiroz wrote:
>>     You must look out more. I use áéíóúç in web pages all the time.
>
> I even use Chinese. (And no, not those big5 or gb2312 funny business.)

Interesting... I tried to put a pound sign on my web page, and it came 
out garbled, so I had to replace it with "£"...

(BTW, I always wondered how the Asian and Chinese people do any work 
with computers, given that the ASCII character set doesn't even include 
any characters in their alphabet...)