Haskell 98: Behaviour of hClose

[Ross Paterson]

On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 09:21:02AM +0100, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> | No yelling, but some random points for consideration:
> | 
> | 1. It might be worth being more explicit, i.e. stating whether this is
> | because the runtime explicitly enables echoing, or because it's
> | assumed that echoing will already be enabled.
> 
> Well, a Haskell user doesn't care.  It's precisely because we want to
> specify the behaviour of Haskell programs, regardless of the underlying
> OS, that it's worth trying to nail down these things.  If the Haskell
> RTS has to nudge the OS into echoing, that's what it should do.

I'm not sure about that.  If I turn off echoing in the OS and then run a
Haskell program, I expect that it won't echo.  Echoing is a function of
the environment.  If a Haskell implementation messes with the terminal
settings for some reason (as Hugs does) then it should emulate the
original settings, but that's all.

So I favour deletion of the offending sentence, leaving this as an
environment-dependency.