On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 1:52 AM, Stayvoid
Probably an alias for backward compatibility; isAlpha is C-style
stuff, which was ASCII only, whereas isLetter is Unicode style. Both Haskell functions support non-ASCII chars. Does it refute your assumption?
No, it demonstrates I need to be more explicit for some people. I did not say isAlpha is ASCII-only, I said it was *created* in an ASCII-only time when "isAlpha" was (the Haskell version of) the common name for the operation. When the Char type became a Unicode codepoint instead of an ASCII character, isAlpha would naturally have been widened to match *and* the corresponding Unicode standard name was imported. Leaving it as is would have introduced bugs (of the sort that the GHC I/O subsystem had until ghc 6.12 or thenabouts, when it was finally made to use UTF8 instead of "ASCII"/ISO 8859-1). -- brandon s allbery allbery.b@gmail.com wandering unix systems administrator (available) (412) 475-9364 vm/sms