Yet more text pedantry

[Ketil Z. Malde]

George Russell <ger@tzi.de> writes:

> Ketil wrote (quoting Ken)

>>> 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

> 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.

How does the file system know the difference?  I think you mean that
C chars on Solaris are signed, not that files and sockets don't
contain octets. 

> I think this demonstrates the perils of saying "It's safe to assume
> everything is 8 bit because everything is now".

I don't think it does so at all.  There may be a peril in assuming
octet IO, but frankly I think trying to anticipate different futures
will only make things messy, and have a great likelyhood of turning
out useless anyway. 

Remember, worse is better.

-kzm
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants