I was wondering if perhaps there was a need for a standard (or at least documentation for all the major compilers) on how one can expect the haskell runtime to interact with the OS enviornment? in particular, questions which I can think of which I would like answered (for POSIX systems, I imagine Win32 would have a seperate set of concerns) are: SIGPIPE, does it kill the process or is it ignored and an IO exception is raised? I would prefer to be able to count on the second behavior. is setlocale(LC_ALL,"") called before main to initialize locale? is SIGALRM safe to use or is it reserved for the haskell implementation? is the full path of the program stored in $_ ? is argv[0] modified in place? (ghc appears to do so brokenly on linux at the moment) There are probably more, Perhaps some sort of document listing such concerns for a given enviornment stating that compilers should document their behavior (or specify a specific behavior when appropriate) and perhaps set some #defines based on them? John -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Meacham - California Institute of Technology, Alum. - john@foo.net ---------------------------------------------------------------------------