[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] ANNOUNCE: jhc 0.7.4

[Richard O'Keefe]

> wren is half right:  at the level of Unixy APIs (and this includes  
> anything
> that goes on in a Terminal window and anything that you will be  
> doing from
> Haskell) you use UTF8, but OSX APIs --- that is, Carbon and Cocoa  
> --- use
> UTF16.  So for the purposes of ghc/jhc OSX is UTF8, but if someone  
> wrote a
> "fully native" Cocoa-based runtime it would use UTF16.  (Compare  
> Win32 APIs
> to mingw APIs; very similar situation.)

I guess the question here is what it _means_ to say that "the standard
encoding" is UTF-8 or UTF-16 or anything else.  I took it to be an
*external* property:  "what is the expected/best supported encoding
for *user* data".  By that criterion, the only standard encoding for
Mac OS X 5 would appear to be UTF-8; it did not come with any support
for *user* data in UTF-16.  If the question means "what is the encoding
used by the kernel, or by the native interfaces to the kernel", that
gets a different answer.

I've now lost track:  what did the original poster mean?