Firstly, we have

  isPrint :: Char -> Bool

Are you saying that this type is wrong?

Secondly, how often do you feed the output of ’show’ to ’read’ in another locale versus how often is everybody whose whole life is outside of ASCII (i.e., not anglo-centric people) bothered by this shortcoming? (*)

Moreover, the argument on the ticket was that changing the current implementation would go against the standard. Now that I am saying, the current implementation is not conforming to the standard, the standard suddenly doesn’t seem to matter. Personally, I would say, when we wrote that standard, we knew what we were doing.