> How do we implement the conversion functions? The approach recently
> added to the CVS version of GHC is to use the native libraries, which
> requires the user to set the locale appropriately. More generally,
> should these functions be locale-dependent at all?
No they shouldn't be locale-dependent, but unfortunately that's what the
C library gives us at the moment. wchar_t should ideally represent
Unicode, but sadly it doesn't (with glibc) unless you set the locale to
something/anything other than "C" or "POSIX".
The situation is worse on Solaris: I had to set the locale to
en_US.UTF-8 before I got correct results. I haven't tried FreeBSD yet.
Windows gives the correct results without having to muck around with
locales (but not if you use cygwin).
So GHC's solution is patchy at the moment, but I hope the situation will
get better in the future as more OSs jump on the wchar_t==Unicode
bandwagon.
Cheers,
Simon
