Re: [Haskell-cafe] Fun with ByteStrings [was: A very edgy language]

Stefan O'Rear:

Char is just a code point. It's a 32 bit integer (64 on 64-bit platforms due to infelicities in the GHC backend) with a code point. [...] The GHC IO functions truncate down to 8 bits. There is no way in GHC to read or write full UTF-8, short of doing the encoding yourself (google for UTF8.lhs).

Thanks, this makes things clear to me.

[Char] is a linked list of pointers to heap-allocated fullword integers, 20 (40) bytes per character (assuming non-latin1).

Hey, I love ByteStrings! ;-) Malte