[Haskell-cafe] Ready for testing: Unicode support for Handle I/O

[Ross Paterson]

On Tue, Feb 03, 2009 at 04:42:44PM +0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
> Unicode-aware Handles
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> This is a significant restructuring of the Handle implementation with
> the primary goal of supporting Unicode character encodings.
>
> The only change to the existing behaviour is that by default, text IO
> is done in the prevailing encoding of the system.  Handles created by
> openBinaryFile use the Latin-1 encoding, as do Handles placed in
> binary mode using hSetBinaryMode.

I would like to see the API make a type distinction between text
handles with Char-based operations, and binary handles with Word8-based
operations.  (And phase out openBinaryFile, hSetBinaryMode etc.)  It's a
vital distinction that often trips people up.  Treating binary data as
Chars with a Latin-1 encoding just feels like a kludge.