"Ketil Z. Malde" wrote:
George Russell <ger@tzi.de> writes:
Ketil wrote (quoting Ken)
On most machines, Char will be a wrapper around Word8. (This contradicts the present language standard.)
Can you point out any machine where this is not the case? One with a Haskell implementation, or likely to have one in the future
That's easy enough. On Sun/Solaris (which I use and which came out as being very popular on the Haskell survey) characters are SIGNED, so the values run from -128 to 127 and the wrapper would be not Word8 but Int8.
How does the file system know the difference? I think you mean that C chars on Solaris are signed, not that files and sockets don't contain octets.
Well, you can define the files to contain only directed graphs if it makes you feel any happier, but the fact is that the standard access functions return characters*, and on Solaris the default representation of a characters is as a signed quantity. *. Though in fact it must be admitted that some, such as fgetc, actually return an integer usually containing an _unsigned_ char, so that negative values can be preserved for other information. Life can be very complicated sometimes.