[Haskell-cafe] Type system madness

[Andrew Coppin]

Albert Y. C. Lai wrote:
> 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?

Let me put it this way: It makes all my Tcl scripts stop working, and it 
makes my Haskell-based processor go nuts too...