On Sun, Sep 30, 2001 at 11:01:38AM -0700, John Meacham wrote:
seeing as how the haskell standard is horribly vauge when it comes to character set encodings anyway, I would recommend that we just omit any reference to the bit size of Char, and just say abstractly that each Char represents one unicode character, but the entire range of unicode is not guarenteed to be expressable, which must be true, since haskell 98 implementations can be written now, but unicode can change in the future. The only range guarenteed to be expressable in any representation are the values 0-127 US ASCII (or perhaps latin1)
I agree about the vagueness, but I believe the Unicode consortium has explicitly limited itself to 21 bits; if they turn out to have been lying about that (which seems unlikely in this millenium), we can hardly be blamed for believing them. I think all that should be required of implementations is that they support 21 bits. Best, Dylan Thurston