Let me try and summarise:
Thanks for the great summary! And thanks to Emacs' table mode here're the results displayed as a table: +--------------------------------+-----+--------+------+-------+-------+ | | now | locale | utf8 | mix-A | mix-B | +--------------------------------+-----+--------+------+-------+-------+ | putStrLn "..." | - | ok | - | ok | ok | +--------------------------------+-----+--------+------+-------+-------+ | ./prog vs ./prog | cat | ok | ok | ok | - | ok | +--------------------------------+-----+--------+------+-------+-------+ | ./prog in vs ./prog < in | - | ok | - | ok | - | +--------------------------------+-----+--------+------+-------+-------+ | ./prog vs ./prog | hexdump -C | ok | ok | ok | - | ok | +--------------------------------+-----+--------+------+-------+-------+ The mixtures are good ideas but can give inconsistent and suriprising results (especially when debugging encoding issues). And if our CEO would have known that ... putStrLn <his-name> ... doesn't work he'd have probably ruled out Haskell right from the start. Even "utf8" gives surprising results: I'd be very surprised if my Mac-written Haskell program outputs junk on Windows or Linux even if the byte sequence is exactly the same UTF-8 text. Personally I think consistency on a single platform is more important than trying to achieve cross-platform consistency which involves a lot more than just encoding. If you've reached that point with your program you're probably anyway using "advanced functions" to exactly specify what will be output. Following "the principle of least surprise" is also a good idea. Cheers, David -- David Leuschner Meisenweg 7 79211 Denzlingen Tel. 07666/912466