Sven Panne wrote:
Also, changing the existing functions to deal with encodings is likely to break a lot of things (i.e. anything which reads or writes data which is in neither UTF-8 nor the locale-specified encoding).
Hmmm, the Unicode tables start with ISO-Latin-1, so what would exactly break when we stipulate that the standard encoding for string I/O in Haskell is ISO-Latin-1?
That would essentially be formally specifying the existing behaviour,
which wouldn't break anything, including the mechanism for
reading/writing binary data which I suggested (and which is the only
choice if your Haskell implementation doesn't have h{Get,Put}Buf).
The problems would come if it was decided to change the existing
behaviour, i.e. use something other than Latin1.
--
Glynn Clements