Text in Haskell: A PROPOSAL

[Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk]

Thu, 8 Aug 2002 03:16:09 -0700, Ashley Yakeley <ashley@semantic.org> pisze:

>>  With, perhaps, UTF-8 as a reasonable default?
> 
> Perhaps it should _always_ be UTF-8?

My files are not in UTF-8, so reading them as UTF-8 is wrong. Files
are in the locale encoding unless the programmer explicitly specifies
otherwise. This is what the locale is for. Filenames are also in the
current locale (in my case ISO-8859-2).

When Linux has enough tools which deal with UTF-8 (text editors,
shells etc.), I might someday switch to UTF-8. Rename files with
ISO-8859-2 filenames to UTF-8 on reiserfs partitions, mount the FAT
partition as UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-2 etc., and start using UTF-8
in file contents, and change the locale so gettextized error messages
from programs come as UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-2.

It haven't happened yet. Please don't decide for me that I should use
UTF-8. I'm not ready yet. 90% of non-ASCII texts I deal with are in
ISO-8859-2 and this default is described by the locale.

-- 
  __("<      Marcin Kowalczyk
  \__/     qrczak@knm.org.pl
   ^^    http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/