[Haskell-cafe] Re: Type system madness

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

wnoise:
> 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

Data.ByteString

> (2) I/O of text in UTF-8.

not in base, but see utf8-string on hackage.haskell.org.
  
> 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

Hmm, there's System.Locale, but I've not used it for anything other than
dates.
 
> 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.

Yes, there's been a few encoding layers on top of Data.ByteString
written for other non-latin1 encodings.

> (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 (This may be a bit out of date, but seeing this brought up again, I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.)

I think its a little out of date, given Data.ByteString and utf8-string?

-- Don