Tue, 09 Jan 2001 13:59:10 +1100, Manuel M. T. Chakravarty <chak@cse.unsw.edu.au> pisze:
I was thinking of having the library itself by default provide a set of standard encodings. Like - as you say later - we usually rely on a set of standard MIME encodings to be available.
If an encoding is added to the database at some point of time, a program uses it and is then recompiled on a system which does not provide this encoding, you get a runtime error. If conversions are referred to as plain imported values, you get a compile error. A database is only useful if encodings are now known individually by the programmer and he wants his program to support everything the Haskell's library provides for some well known name scheme. It can be a convenience wrapper, but definitely not the basic reference for conversions. -- __("< Marcin Kowalczyk * qrczak@knm.org.pl http://qrczak.ids.net.pl/ \__/ ^^ SYGNATURA ZASTÊPCZA QRCZAK