On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 07:28 -0800, John Meacham wrote:
On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 01:34:54PM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
Personally I'm not really fussed about which compromise we pick. I think the more important point is that all the Haskell implementations pick the same compromise so that we can effectively standardise the behaviour.
Wait, are you talking about changing what ghc does or trying to change the haskell standard? I always thought ghc should do something more sane with character IO, non unicode aware programs are a blight.
I don't think choosing something arbitrary to standardize on is a good idea. It is not always clear what the best choice is. like, for instance until recently, jhc used locale encoding on linux, due to glibc's strong charset support and guarenteed use of unicode wchar_t's, but utf8 always on bsd-varients, where the wchar_t situation was less clear cut. On embedded systems, only supporting ASCII IO is certainly a valid choice. For a .NET backend, we will want to use .NET's native character IO routines.
Oh I wasn't trying to pin it down that much. If you want to use ebdic on some embedded platform by default I don't care. I really mean that it'd be nice if hugs, ghc, jhcm nhc98 etc could agree for each of the major platforms, Linux/Unix, OS X and Windows. And I don't mean necessarily that they should do the same thing across platforms (eg as I understand it OS X would always use UTF8 not a variable locale) just that they should do the same on the same platform. So not a change of the H98 spec, just a common consensus on the major platforms. Duncan