Alex unicode trick

Greetings, When looking at the GHC lexer (Lexer.x), there's:

$unispace = \x05 -- Trick Alex into handling Unicode. See alexGetChar. $whitechar = [\ \n\r\f\v $unispace] $white_no_nl = $whitechar # \n $tab = \t

Scrolling down to alexGetChar and alexGetChar', we see the comments:

-- backwards compatibility for Alex 2.x alexGetChar :: AlexInput -> Maybe (Char,AlexInput)

-- This version does not squash unicode characters, it is used when -- lexing strings. alexGetChar' :: AlexInput -> Maybe (Char,AlexInput)

What's the reason for these? I was under the impression that since 3.0, Alex has natively supported unicode. Is it just dead code? Could all the hex $uni* functions be removed? If not, why not? -- Mateusz K.