On Jan 13, 2010, at 14:42 , Andrew Coppin wrote:
Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
On Jan 13, 2010, at 14:25 , Andrew Coppin wrote:
Colin Paul Adams wrote:
Andrew> It's weird that us Haskell people complain about there Andrew> being only 26 letters in the alphabet
Which alphabet? You have plenty of choice in Unicode.
Er... I was under the impression that Haskell source code uses the ASCII character set, not Unicode.
The Report would beg to differ with you; see section 2.1. "Haskell uses the Unicode [11] character set. However, source programs are currently biased toward the ASCII character set used in earlier versions of Haskell ." ("Currently" at the time being 1998. Unicode is more prevalent these days.)
So... how would GHC tell which of the hundreds of millions of possible character encodings is in use?
That's left to the compiler implementation. I'm not spotting an official statement in the GHC manual, but in practice GHC uses UTF-8. (It might support Windows standard UTF-16 as well; if do, it probably requires the first character of the source file to be a UTF-16 byte order mark.)
(And even if that's not the case, I've yet to find a way to type in the Unicode characters which are hypothetically possible.)
That's a problem with your editor/development environment.
Or rather, the problem with every computer system known to man?
s/man/you/ The existence of -XUnicodeSyntax ( http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/syntax-extns.html#un... ) suggests that at least some other GHC users don't have your problem. -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH