On 1/23/08, Johan Tibell
they accept or return Chars (and Strings). If they deal in terms of bytes (e.g. socket functions) they should accept and return Word8s. Optionally, text I/O functions could default to the system locale setting.
Yes, this reflects my recent experience, Char is not a good representation for an 8-bit byte. This thread came out of my attempt to add a module to dataenc[1] that would make base64-string[2] obsolete. As you probably can guess I came to the conclusion that a function for data encoding with type 'String -> String' is plain wrong. :-) /M [1]: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/dataenc-0.10.2 [2]: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/base64-string-0.1