[Haskell-cafe] Has character changed in GHC 6.8?

[Reinier Lamers]

Johan Tibell wrote:
>>>>> What *does* matter to the programmer is what encodings putStr and
>>>>> getLine use. AFAIK, they use "lower 8 bits of unicode code point" which
>>>>> is almost functionally equivalent to latin-1.
>>>>>           
>>>> Which is terrible! You should have to be explicit about what encoding
>>>> you expect. Python 3000 does it right.
>>>>         
>>> Presumably there wasn't a sufficiently good answer available in time for
>>> haskell98.
>>>       
>> Will there be one for haskell prime ?
>>     
>
> The I/O library needs an overhaul but I'm not sure how to do this in a
> backwards compatible manner which probably would be required for
> inclusion in Haskell'. One could, like Python 3000, break backwards
> compatibility. I'm not sure about the implications of doing this.
> Maybe introducing a new System.IO.Unicode module would be an option.
There are already some libraries that attempt to create a new string and
I/O library for Haskell, based on Unicode, with a separation of byte
semantics and character semantics. See for example Streams [1] or
CompactString [2].

Regards,
Reinier

[1]: http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Library/Streams
[2]: http://twan.home.fmf.nl/compact-string/