(note change of forum from glasgow-haskell-users) On 2003-12-19 at 12:28GMT MR K P SCHUPKE wrote: [

I wrote: ]

...

The problem is that if you are reading single bytes, 233 is not necessarily é.

Erm, Internationalisation is not my thin as such... but I can't help commenting that from a systems point of view this is an utterly bad sitiation to be in...

It certainly is.

I though Haskell used unicode?

It's supposed to. Note that I said "/if/ you are reading a single byte", meaning that I was talking about the (not uncommon) curcumstance where the underlying operating system presents you with bytes each of which represents a single character (ie not something like utf-8). Haskell is supposed to deal with Unicode internally, but the I/O system's treatment of it is not currently in a happy state, at least partly because of what lies beneath.

I thought in unicode the id of a character was fixed irrespective of language.

It is.

Where is unicode support lacking?

All over the place. There's this monstrous notion of "locale" that means that if you move your computer across the border from Germany into Poland and change the system settings appropriately, all character files change their meanings. It stems from files being untyped, and as all good Haskell programmers know, untyped is a Bad Thing. Jón -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk