Yet more text pedantry

[Alastair Reid]

Can we stop the pedantry and have some people go off in a corner and
produce a design which:

1) Solves some of the internationalization issues notably those
   involving unicode and locales.

2) Will work on a decent range of existing and plausible future
   Windows and Unix boxes.  (Embedded systems, mainframes, PDAs,
   etc. are also worthwhile but since we would not run the full
   Haskell libraries on them they are of secondary importance.)

   That is, follow a standard spec if you can but when the spec
   becomes impossible to use because of some wild generalization which
   covers situations that will never come up, make a few assumptions
   based on what real systems do.

3) Can support nearly all of the current Haskell '98 libraries without
   change and as much as possible of the Hugs-GHC/hslibs/hierarchial
   libraries with slight changes.  This is partly because, for all its
   faults, the current interface has the virtue of being simple.

   I envisage a veneer which implements the old interface on top of
   the new design.  That is, the new design might expose all kinds of
   information about the encoding in the typesystem or through conversion
   functions or whatever but this complexity could be hidden behind
   an interface which reads and writes characters and does something
   plausible when it encounters UTF-32 and friends.

4) Relies on (and plays well with) Haskell'98 and approved addenda.
   
   (It's possible to meet this goal by lobbying for other common
   extensions to become approved addenda.)

5) Someone is going to produce a decent quality implementation for.
   (Talk is cheap and all that...)

   This is much easier now that both Hugs and GHC are working from the
   same source tree for libraries (with suggestions that NHC will
   follow suit).

--
Alastair Reid                 alastair@reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk  
Reid Consulting (UK) Limited  http://www.reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk/alastair/