[Haskell-cafe] Unicode support (Was: Type system madness)

Henning Thielemann lemming at henning-thielemann.de
Thu Jul 12 03:41:09 EDT 2007


On Thu, 12 Jul 2007, Jonathan Cast wrote:

> On Thursday 12 July 2007, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> > On Tue, 10 Jul 2007, 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.
> >
> > I don't see a greek letter alpha here, but scrambled code in 'pine' here.
>
> There's your problem right there.  Get either a terminal or a mail program
> that knows UTF-8.

 I do now understand how "well supported" is meant. If a program doesn't
support UTF-8/Unicode, that's not the problem of Unicode, but the problem
of the program and its users. If we restrict the range of considered
applications to those which support UTF-8 then UTF-8 is globally
supported.
 This leads me to an idea: We declare exclusively Haskell programs being
"real programs" then we can safely claim that Haskell is the only
language, where real programs can be written in. :-]


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