Yet more text pedantry

[George Russell]

Ketil wrote (quoting Ken)
[snip]
> > On most machines, Char will be a wrapper around Word8.  (This
> > contradicts the present language standard.)
> 
> Can you point out any machine where this is not the case?  One with a
> Haskell implementation, or likely to have one in the future
[snip]
That's easy enough.  On Sun/Solaris (which I use and which came out as
being very popular on the Haskell survey) characters are SIGNED, so the
values run from -128 to 127 and the wrapper would be not Word8 but Int8.

I think this demonstrates the perils of saying "It's safe to assume everytning
is 8 bit because everything is now".  Although it is the case now that the
overwhelming majority of computers use data sizes based on powers of 2, it is
nothing other than speculation to say that this will always be the case.