H98 Text IO

[David Leuschner]

> I really mean that it'd
> be nice if hugs, ghc, jhcm nhc98 etc could agree for each of the major
> platforms, Linux/Unix, OS X and Windows. And I don't mean necessarily
> that they should do the same thing across platforms (eg as I understand
> it OS X would always use UTF8 not a variable locale) just that they
> should do the same on the same platform.

That's exactly what I (an employee developing commercially used Haskell
applications) would like to see.  Java does the same thing and it always
works as expected and that's always best.  

Java has a platform default encoding which is not fixed (on Linux it's
dependent on the current locale as set by the LC_CTYPE, LC_ALL or LANG
environment variables) but is determined in a way consistent with the
platform.  The platform default encoding is only used if no other encoding
is explicitly given.  In general when considering industrial adoption it's
probably always a good idea to have a look at Java.  We've never had
(real) problems with Java programs, but lots of problems with Python,
Haskell and Ocaml.

If I write simple program just printing a non-ASCII string to the terminal
or to a file I'd expect that I can read it on the screen or using my
favorite text editor without having change anything -- neither in my
terminal nor in my program.  When I run the program on my platform don't
mind if somebody else might get differently encoded output from the same
program as long as I get what I expect.  If I as a programmer really want
to make sure that everybody gets the same output I can make sure a
specific encoding is used.

Cheers,

   David

-- 
David Leuschner
Meisenweg 7
79211 Denzlingen
Tel. 07666/912466
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