In article <16327.48238.250504.185912@cerise.nosuchdomain.co.uk>, Glynn Clements <glynn.clements@virgin.net> wrote:
Simply claiming that values of type Char are Unicode characters doesn't make it so.
Actually, that's exactly what makes it so. And in article <16328.28298.217184.540118@cerise.nosuchdomain.co.uk>, Glynn Clements <glynn.clements@virgin.net> wrote:
Unless I'm missing something, the only "support" that GHC provides is that Char is 4 bytes.
No, on GHC a Char is a Unicode codepoint, which means it has only 17*2^16 possible values. This by itself is the most important aspect of Unicode support. But most of the rest is missing.
If you use Char to store anything other than ISO Latin-1 characters, none of the Haskell functions with Char in their signature will be of any use.
Actually, many of those functions ought to use Word8 instead. -- Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA