[Haskell-i18n] Proposal for a Unicode-safe layout rule

Simon Marlow simonmar@microsoft.com
Mon, 4 Aug 2003 12:49:48 +0100


=20
> There is nothing wrong with the current layout rules[1]; they don't
> need to change.
>=20
> [1] Regarding tabs, that is; there *is* a problem when you start
> dealing with characters which aren't necessarily "one character cell"
> wide (e.g. CJK).

Note that the revised Haskell 98 report contains this paragraph (section
9.3), which was added as a result of previous discussion on this topic:

  For the purposes of the layout rule, Unicode characters in a source
  program are considered to be of the same, fixed, width as an ASCII
  character.  However, to avoid visual confusion, programmers should
avoid
  writing programs in which the meaning of implicit layout depends on
the
  width of non-space characters.

I think this is all that is needed.

Cheers,
	Simon