Ben Rudiak-Gould wrote:
Char in Haskell represents a Unicode character. I don't know exactly what its size is, but it must be at least 16 bits and maybe more. String would then share those properties.
However, usually I'm accustomed to dealing with data in 8-bit words. So I have some questions:
Char and String handling in Haskell is deeply broken.
More accurately, string I/O (meaning all OS interfaces which take or
return strings, not just reading/writing files) in Haskell is deeply
broken.
The Haskell functions accept or return Strings but interface to OS
functions which (at least on Unix) deal with arrays of bytes (char*),
and the encoding issues are essentially ignored. If you pass strings
containing anything other than ISO-8859-1, you lose.
--
Glynn Clements