Yet more text pedantry

[Ketil Z. Malde]

George Russell <ger@tzi.de> writes:

>> 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.

> Well, you can define the files to contain only directed graphs if it makes
> you feel any happier,  but the fact is that the standard access functions 
> return characters*, 

What "standard access functions"? The functions found in C libraries?
>From Solaris man pages, the "read" system call reads bytes into a void
* buffer.

I would propose that the standard access functions in *Haskell* return
Word8, *regardless* of operating system or C libraries.  As long as
you have primitives to do octet IO, this should be straightforward,
regardless of whether the OS (or other programming languages or
libraries) thinks the octet is signed or not. 

> and on Solaris the default representation of a characters is as a
> signed quantity. 

Why should we care?

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