On 2005-01-10, Simon Marlow
- Can you do String I/O in some encoding of Unicode? No Haskell compiler has support for this yet, and there are design decisions to be made. Some progress has been made on an experimental prototype (see recent discussion on this list).
Many of the easy ways to do this that I've heard proposed make the current hacks for binary IO fail.
Making hacks fail isn't necessarily a bad thing :-)
True, but making the tasks the hacks enable impossible (sans FFI) is. And doing that myself involves rewrapping stdio and networking.
I'm not keen to provide binary IO on top of the existing IO library, and then to have Unicode as a layer on top of that. Performance will be terrible. It needs to be designed properly from the ground up.
Agreed. I was thinking in the end binary IO as the base and both the current standard and some unicode on top of that, though even that might be unwieldy.
Not a problem. Have you looked at the streams proposal?
I took a brief look a while back. I don't have much time to hack on anything these days, and nothing stood out as being obviously horrible. I'll take another look. -- Aaron Denney -><-