[Haskell-cafe] Can we improve Show instance for non-ascii charcters?

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

Am Mittwoch, den 03.02.2016, 23:39 -0500 schrieb Gershom B:
> Backwards compatibility is important, but not an absolute. I’d be
> curious if anyone can point to instances where software might _rely_
> on the show instance for strings not displaying unicode characters?

some people do use Show and Read as a quick-and-easy
serialization/deserialization method, and some of them might assume
that only ASCII characters are in use, so they maybe did not bother
taking encodings in account when writing them out or in.

There are many disencouraged practices mentioned in the above
paragraph, but unfortunately, it’s our users that do disencouraged
practices that most likely would not pay attention to breaking code
changes in the standard libraries, are least likely to update their
code and thus be hit the worst.

It’s a pitty, and it should be added to the list of things to do better
with the next larger language revision (if such a thing ever happens).

Greetings,
Joachim


-- 
Joachim “nomeata” Breitner
  mail at joachim-breitner.de • http://www.joachim-breitner.de/
  Jabber: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de  • GPG-Key: 0xF0FBF51F
  Debian Developer: nomeata at debian.org

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