Khudyakov Alexey wrote:
Actually, the behavior of openFile when given a String with characters > 0xFF is also completely undocumented. I am not sure what it does with that. It should probably be the same as runCommand, whatever it is.
Under unices file names are just array of bytes. There is no notion of encoding at all. It's just matter of interpretation of that array.
Quite right. One must be able to pass binary strings, which contain anything except \0 and '/' to openFile. The same goes for runCommand. I am uncomfortable, for this reason, with saying that runCommand ought to re-encode in the system locale while openFile doesn't. It is preferable to drop characters than to drop the ability to pass arbitrary binary data. So I am not sure I agree with your stance in http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/4006 -- John