What is a punctuation character?

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 3:22 PM, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 15:20, Gabriel Dos Reis
> <gdr at integrable-solutions.net> wrote:
>>
>> I believe this part has seen very little change from the Revised
>> Haskell 98 Report.
>
>
> I was in fact looking at the Haskell 98 report at the time.
>
>>
>> It is not clear that it is an unintended leftover.  Section 2.1 that
>
>
> Nothing is ever clear.  This useless pedanticism being stipulated, there is

I very much appreciate any clarification you have on the topic.  However, I
believe we do best when we leave phrases like "useless pedanticism"
or "pedantically"  out.  They are rarely constructive and no substance to an
otherwise informative discussion.  At best, they would distract us.

(In matter of programming language definition, "pedanticism" should be the
least of our worries -- and it probably should not come with a modifier
such as "useless", we should probably wear it as badge of honor.)

> no purpose to a completely overlapping category unless it is intended to
> relate to an earlier standard (say Haskell 1.4).

which in itself is not an unambiguous interpretation :-)

>>
>> Unicode support is clearly intended.  Also clearly, ASCII support is
>> intended.
>> However, the Report does not say what the concrete syntax of a Unicode
>> character
>> should be. (At least I have been unable to find it from the report.)
>
>
> Maybe what needs to be pedantically specified is that the link to the
> Unicode standard is intended to be inclusion of that standard by reference
> (the [11] in the section I quoted is an endnote referencing the Unicode
> standard) and not merely informational.  Or are you insisting we are not
> precise enough unless we enumerate all the Unicode characters explicitly in
> the Haskell standard?

Giving a link to the Unicode standard does not really help with the
original questions.
I know where to find the Unicode standard; that wasn't the issue.

One of the underlying questions is: what is the concrete syntax of a
Unicode character
in a Haskell program?  Note that Chapter 2 goes to a great pain to
specify the ASCII
concrete syntax.

To put things in perspective, have look at this specification of
programs supposed
to be written using Unicode characters.

   http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jls/se7/html/jls-3.html#jls-3.2

-- Gaby