[Haskell-cafe] Re: Type system madness

[Aaron Denney]

On 2007-07-14, Donald Bruce Stewart <dons at cse.unsw.edu.au> wrote:
> 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

And does this work for Non-GHC yet?  And when does it get added to
Haskell' and guaranteed to work?

>> (2) I/O of text in UTF-8.
>
> not in base, but see utf8-string on hackage.haskell.org.

Yes, this a decent layering of (2), on top of (1), for GHC only,
depending on it to reading the bytes, and interpreting them as Latin-1.

>> (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 (This may be a bit out of date, but seeing this brought up again, I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 I think its a little out of date, given Data.ByteString and utf8-string?

It's not obvious that ByteString is the place to look for I/O, so it's
not yet good enough.  It should be as easy to use as character I/O, and as 
easy to find.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-