On 26 Mar 2012, at 15:30, Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
The Haskell Report claims very prominently that it uses the Unicode character set. The question is whether it should be using it correctly at all, and if so should it even try to pretend that its default string type use those characters correctly.
In the region of this side of the Atlantic Ocean where I teach, the student population is very diverse
Prelude> putStrLn (take 5 "Fröhßen") Fröhß Prelude> putStrLn "фхцчшщъыьэюя" фхцчшщъыьэюя Prelude> putStrLn "देवनागरी" देवनागरी Prelude> putStrLn "아햇글" 아햇글 Prelude> putStrLn (take 2 "아햇글") 아햇 Whilst there are some places that things do not work out fully correctly - several such warts have been mentioned already in this thread - on the whole, I think Haskell's [Char] is fundamentally not as culturally restrictive as you make out. Regards, Malcolm