26 Feb
2008
26 Feb
'08
7:44 a.m.
On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 11:47:49AM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
The major problem is with code that assumes GHC's Handles are essentially Word8 and layer their own UTF8 or other decoding over the top. The utf8-string package has this problem for example. Such code should be using openBinaryFile because they are reading/writing binary data, not String text.
As I was saying on cabal-devel, I think this distinction ought to be in the types, i.e. we need, in base, a type distinct from Handle that offers a Word8 interface to binary I/O, as a foundation for various experiments with encodings (which need not all be in base).