[Haskell-cafe] Type system madness

[Albert Y. C. Lai]

Andrew Coppin wrote:
> When I tell the editor to save UTF-8, it inserts some weird "BOM" 
> character at the start of the file - and thus, any attempt at 
> programatically processing that file instantly fails. :-(

I know Windows Notepad puts a BOM at the beginning of UTF-8 files. 
http://www.vex.net/~trebla/w.htm is written out by Notepad and has the 
beginning BOM. Firefox and IE display it just fine. Windows Notepad, 
GNOME gedit, Emacs, Vim, and Eclipse are also very graceful about it. If 
you rename it to w.lhs, GHC reads it as a fine Haskell source file, as I 
sneaked in a little Haskell hello-world as an HTML comment, e.g., 
"runghc w.lhs" does wonder. So much for BOM foiling any processing.

Any more FUD to debunk? Wanna hear something about purely functional 
languages incapacitated for I/O? Static typing leading to excessive type 
declarations? Automatic garbage collection irrelevant to the real world?