[Haskell-cafe] Type system madness

[Andrew Coppin]

Stefan O'Rear wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 08:05:36PM +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>   
>> I was actually commenting on the other guy's remark that "anything that
>> chokes on a BOM can be considered buggy" - not entirely seriously. ;-)
>>
>> If there is a "bug" to be reported, it is merely that [the GHC 
>> implementation of] Haskell appears to interpret files as containing "8-bit 
>> ASCII", rather than doing real character encodings. I have no idea whether 
>>     
>
> There is no such thing as 8-bit ASCII - base assumes files contain
> ISO-8859-1.
>   

Indeed - ASCII is actually a 7-bit standard. But all known systems use 8 
bits/character, and use the extra bit in various random ways. Everybody 
seems to *call* this "8-bit ASCII", despite that being a rather silly name.

I have no idea what "ISO-8859-1" is. (But let's not start another thread 
about that...)

>> anybody has filed a bug report / feature request for this. (Come to think 
>> of it, I have no idea how to check either...)
>>     
>
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/query
>   

Ah... OK.