Duncan Coutts
It doesn't affect functions added by the hierarchical libraries, i.e. those functions are safe only with the ASCII subset. (There is a vague plan to make Foreign.C.String conform to the FFI spec, which mandates locale-based encoding, and thus would change all those, but it's still up in the air.)
Hmm. I'm not convinced that automatically converting to the current locale is the ideal behaviour (it'd certianly break all my programs!). Certainly a function for converting into the encoding of the current locale would be useful for may users but it's important to be able to know the encoding with certainty.
It should only be the default, not the only option. It should be possible to specify the encoding explicitly. -- __("< Marcin Kowalczyk \__/ qrczak@knm.org.pl ^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/