On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 01:07:50PM +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
It'd be nice if there was agreement between the different implementations. It seems we're not far from agreement between at least hugs, ghc and jhc.
Ross, perhaps you can put the argument for what hugs currently does - always using the locale for all terminal an text file IO rather than picking a fixed encoding.
I'm not going claim it's ideal, but the situation created by Haskell 98 is that Handles are supposed to deal in Chars, but their relationship to external encodings is undefined. Given that, implementations have to make a somewhat arbitrary choice. I suppose the argument for the locale is the UTF-8 has not yet taken over the world. I agree that it's weaker for files and sockets, since they are shared between different systems. I'm not worried about breaking broken programs. I'll just note in passing that similar issues arise with system calls, notably file operations, program arguments and the environment. But I/O is probably sufficient trouble for today.