On 07 January 2005 13:01, Dimitry Golubovsky wrote:

Lennart Augustsson wrote:

...

Simon Marlow wrote:

...

Here's a summary of the state of Unicode support in GHC and other compilers. There are several aspects:

- Can the Char type hold the full range of Unicode characters? This has been true in GHC for some time, and is now true in Hugs. I don't think it's true in nhc98 (please correct me if I'm wrong).

I remember, it was in GHC. But any attempt to output Unicode characters using standard I/O functions always ended up outputting only low 8 bits. Has anything changed since then?

No, that's still the case (I mentioned it in a separate point in that message).

...

...

- Do the character class functions (isUpper, isAlpha etc.) work correctly on the full range of Unicode characters? This is true in Hugs. It's true with GHC on some systems (basically we were lazy and used the underlying C library's support here, which is patchy).

Which basically means that one with older or underconfigured system where they do not have permissions/technical possibilities to configure locales in the C library properly is out of luck...

True. Anyone care to take Hugs' implementation of the character class functions and put it in GHC?

The reason I asked this question was: I am trying to understand, where is internationalization of Haskell compilers on their developers' list of priorities, and also how high is demand from users to have at least basic internationalization.

We're keen to have it. The more people that complain about the lack of it, the faster it'll get done, probably :-) Cheers, Simon