Gah! I managed to send that without a content-type field (for bizarre reasons which I won't elaborate right now). Here it is again with what I hope is the right (utf-8) type, which ought to make it more legible in some email readers. On 2006-03-25 at 09:41PST "Jared Updike" wrote:
2218 RING OPERATOR = composite function = APL jot 00B0 degree sign 25E6 white bullet
I don't think any other Unicode character should be considered.
That's great but 1) I have no idea how to type it. Can I easily and comfortably? In emacs?
For emacs, just bind a key (C-. say) to (ucs-insert #X2218). ucs-insert comes from ucs-tables.
2) Will it show up in PuTTY (and everyone else's terminals/IDEs)?
Eventually.
in everyone's mail readers (including Gmail)?
Eventually, I should think. I'm using nmh, which has to be one of the least trendy MUAs about, and that can do it. What does this: ∘ look like in your email reader?
3) What encoding do my textfiles need to be in
Probably utf-8
(i.e. how many bytes per char)?
a bit more than one on average.
How do I do that?
Depends on the OS you are using. I've got locale set to en_GB.UTF-8 and it all more or less works.
Does Haskell even support everything related to Unicode that we'd need?
Not now, but Haskell' jolly well ought to.
If the answers are satisfactory to all these questions, then Unicode is a good idea (and that's the ideal character).
"Satisfactory" is in the eye of the beholder.
If not, we're sadly stuck in ASCII land.
It's far worse than that. We are stuck in an idiotic land where the meaning of a file depends on the meaning of a user settable variable in the OS. This is one of the many unpleasant consequences of untyped filesystems¹. Oh, and Haskell claims already to have unicode source files, but the compilers can't handle it.
Jared.
P.S. Plus that opens a lot of cans of worms for writing programs with all those fancy symbols! APL here we come!
It's a question of good style, isn't it? Using → instead of -> might be nice, but stringing together lots of arcane symbols like ₀∘°⁰ wouldn't be. For Haskell 98 I argued against unicode, preferring that we should stick with ASCII, but nowadays a language that doesn't handle unicode properly is going to look shabby in a few years. Jón [1] Something about which something should be done in Haskell... -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn at cl.cam.ac.uk