Ketil Malde wrote:

So let's all switch to unicode ASAP and leave that horrible
multi-byte-string-thing behind us?


You are being ironic, I take it?

No I just used wrong terminology. When I said unicode, I actually meant UCS-x, and with multi-byte-string-thing I meant VARIABLE-length, sorry about that. I find variable length chars so much harder to use and reason about than the fixed length characters. UTF-x is a form of compression, which is understandable, but it is IMHO a burden (since it does not allow random access to the n-th character)

Now I'm getting a bit confused here. To summarize, what encoding does GHC 6.8.2 use for [Char]? UCS-32?

BTW: According the Wikipedia, UCS-4 and UTF-32 are functionally equivalent.

Cheers,
Peter