[Haskell-cafe] Re: Type system madness

[Aaron Denney]

On 2007-07-13, Stefan O'Rear <stefanor at cox.net> wrote:
> He's not trying to report a bug; he's just complaining about base's
> long-known lack of support for non-latin1 encodings. (IIUC)

Which is a bug.  Base needs to support (in an /obvious/ way)
(1) direct I/O of octets (bytes), with no character interpretation set
(2) I/O of text in UTF-8.

In addition, it would be nice to support 
(3) (On Unix) use of locale to determine text encoding
but users can work around this themselves, and will often need to, even
if (3) is supported.

(2) can also be layered atop (1), but something is wrong if you have to
write your own layer to do simple text input and output.  It's even
worse if you can't without going to the FFI.

(1) can currently be done, but it's not at all clear how to do so, or
once you have figured out how to do so, why it works.

(This may be a bit out of date, but seeing this brought up again, I
think not.)

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-