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.
That's exactly what I (an employee developing commercially used Haskell applications) would like to see. Java does the same thing and it always works as expected and that's always best. Java has a platform default encoding which is not fixed (on Linux it's dependent on the current locale as set by the LC_CTYPE, LC_ALL or LANG environment variables) but is determined in a way consistent with the platform. The platform default encoding is only used if no other encoding is explicitly given. In general when considering industrial adoption it's probably always a good idea to have a look at Java. We've never had (real) problems with Java programs, but lots of problems with Python, Haskell and Ocaml. If I write simple program just printing a non-ASCII string to the terminal or to a file I'd expect that I can read it on the screen or using my favorite text editor without having change anything -- neither in my terminal nor in my program. When I run the program on my platform don't mind if somebody else might get differently encoded output from the same program as long as I get what I expect. If I as a programmer really want to make sure that everybody gets the same output I can make sure a specific encoding is used. Cheers, David -- David Leuschner Meisenweg 7 79211 Denzlingen Tel. 07666/912466