Re: Unicode support

1 Oct 2001

      Colin Paul Adams  writes:
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"Jens" == Jens Petersen  writes:
Jens> 16 bits is enough to describe the Basic Multilingual Plane
    Jens> and I think 24 bits all the currently defined extended
    Jens> planes.  So I guess the report just refers to the BMP.
I guess it does, and I think back in 1998 that may still have been
identical to Unicode. 
But the revision of the report that SPJ is preparing is unchanged in
this respect, and so is factually inaccurate.
I think it should either be amended to mention the BMP subset of
Unicode, or, better, change the reference from 16-bit to 24-bit.
Actually ISO 10646 defines formally a 31-bit character set. [1]

Is it still possible to update the latest revision of the
Haskell 98 report to this effect?  (There was some unicode
discussion earlier, about upper and lower case if I remember
correctly, but I am surprised noone has raised this point
again.)

Jens

ps We need better unicode support in the implementations too.
At least ghc-5 has 31 bit Char's now!  Hurrah!

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html