Ketil wrote (quoting Ken) [snip]
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 [snip] 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.
I think this demonstrates the perils of saying "It's safe to assume everytning is 8 bit because everything is now". Although it is the case now that the overwhelming majority of computers use data sizes based on powers of 2, it is nothing other than speculation to say that this will always be the case.