[Haskell-cafe] printing unicode in Windows console: hPutChar error

[Julian Bradfield]

Some of my poor misguided students are still using Windows, and when
they run my (predecessor's) Haskell program which uses Unicode box drawing
characters in its output, they get
*** Exception <stdout>: hPutChar: invalid argument (invalid character)

Another student told them to change the console encoding via magic:
chcp.com 65001

but a bit of googling suggests that a "modern Windows console program"
should be using the widechar API to print Unicode and things should
Just Work.

Does Haskell have a principled view about character encodings?
Or does it just say "I do byte strings, it's the user's problem"?

Decades ago I was all in favour of charset-agnosticism, but these
days I tend to think "go Unicode, and leave the legacy Latin-1
etc. data as the user's problem" :)

Julian.

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