On Tue, 2008-01-22 at 09:29 +0000, Magnus Therning wrote:
> I vaguely remember that in GHC 6.6 code like this
>
> length $ map ord "a string"
>
> being able able to generate a different answer than
>
> length "a string"
That seems unlikely.
Unlikely yes, yet I get the following in GHCi (ghc 6.6.1, the version currently in Debian Sid):
> map ord "a"
[97]
> map ord "ö"
[195,182]
Funky, isn't it? ;-)
Easy!
Prelude> 'å' == '\229'
True
Prelude> 'å' == Char.chr 229
True
Remember, when you type:
Prelude> 'å'
what you really get is:
Prelude> putStrLn (show 'å')
So perhaps what is confusing you is the Show instance for Char which
converts Char -> String into a portable ascii representation.
Have you tried putting any of this into GHCi (6.6.1)? Any line with 'å' results in the following for me:
> 'å'
<interactive>:1:2: lexical error in string/character literal at character '\165'
> "å"
"\195\165"
Somewhat disappointing. GHCi 6.8.2 does perform better though.
/M