2011/3/30 Simon Marlow <marlowsd@gmail.com>

On 30/03/2011 10:58, Simon Meier wrote:

In the 'bytestring' library, String handling based on this encoding is
provided by the Data.ByteString.Char8 module and its lazy cousin.
Therefore, I'd suggest to name this non-standard (or is there a
standard?) encoding

char8 :: TextEncoding

Apart from historical reasons, I also prefer this name as it conveys
more information about its semantics.

There's a clash here as we already use the term "binary" elsewhere in the System.IO API: openBinaryFile, hSetBinary. So, it's not clear to me that being consistent with Data.ByteString is better than being consistent with System.IO. On the other hand, "char8" is a better name than "binary". I don't feel strongly either way here.

Ah, I didn't see that. However, if I recall correctly, the long-term plan is to introduce a separate type for binary files. I would expect that the caller has to explicitly specify an encoding when writing a String to such a binary file. However, there still might be uses of text file handles with a 'char8' encoding. Hence, in the long-term, we can actually avoid confusion by not choosing 'binary' as the name of this encoding.

best regards,

Simon