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

[Jonathan Cast]

On Thursday 12 July 2007, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> 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. :-]

The last release of Pine came out 28 September 2005; the last release to add 
new features came out 10 May 2004; the last time the major version number was 
bumped was 8 July 1998.  I can appreciate clinging to old, comfortable 
software; it took quite a bit to get me to abandon nmh.  But I did it, 
because that software simply doesn't work on the modern internet.  A certain 
level of seriousness is required when making software choices, after all.  
And some software is just too old to be taken seriously.

Jonathan Cast
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fid-core
http://sourceforge.net/projects/fid-emacs