Let's have an open discussion on internationalization issues here. Some issues to discuss. * Unicode in standard IO functions Since Haskell Chars are Unicode, should standard Haskell 98 IO functions be made to obey the locale charset? If the locale charset is iso-8859-1 it will work as before (possibly with some transliteration done, instead of just taking character values modulo 256). See also thread on linux-utf8 mailing list (http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/2000-10/msg00139.html). There are no semantics on things like putStr in the library report, there ought to be. * Unicode library We need a good Unicode library apart from the standard IO functions that can be used with specialized IO, in bindings and so on. * Other locale issues Should there be locale dependent show functions (, for decimal separator etc.) * Translation issues What is the best way to make programs translatable? I have some files at http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d95mback/gettext/ which could be commented on. I propose that when the Haskell Wiki comes online, we use that to produce draft enhancements to the existing Haskell 98 language report, and perhaps the new Unicode libraries. Regards, Martin -- Martin Norbäck d95mback@dtek.chalmers.se Kapplandsgatan 40 +46 (0)708 26 33 60 S-414 78 GÖTEBORG http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d95mback/ SWEDEN OpenPGP ID: 3FA8580B