On Wed, Mar 16, 2005 at 03:54:19AM +0000, Ian Lynagh wrote:
Do you have a list of functions which behave differently in the new release to how they did in the previous release? (I'm not interested in changes that will affect only whether something compiles, not how it behaves given it compiles both before and after).
I got lost in the negatives here. It affects all Haskell 98 primitives that do character I/O, or that exchange C strings with the C library. 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.)
Finally, the hugs behaviour seems a little odd to me. The below shows 4 cases where iconv complains when asked to convert utf8 to utf8, but hugs only gives an error in one of them. In the others it just truncates the input. Is this really correct? It also seems to behave the same for me regardless of whether I export LC_CTYPE to en_GB.UTF-8 or C.
It's a bug: an unrecognized encoding at the end of the input was being ignored instead of triggering the exception. Now fixed in CVS (rev. 1.14 of src/char.c if anyone's backporting). It was an accident of this example that the behaviour in all locales was the same.