Mon, 15 May 2000 02:45:17 -0700, Simon Marlow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> pisze:
> OTOH, it wouldn't be hard to change GHC's Char datatype to be a
> full 32-bit integral data type.
Could we do it please?
It will not break anything if done slowly. I imagine that
{read,write}CharOffAddr and _ccall_ will still use only 8 bits of
Char. But after Char is wide, libraries dealing with text conversion
will be possible to be designed, to prepare for future international
I/O, together with Foreign libraries.
CChar will be a newtyped Int8 (or Word8 if char is unsigned), HsChar
will be e.g. unsigned int. These types are fresh, so good time to
do it now. There is an incompatibility with C functions returning a
char called from the natively generated code (without consulting a
C prototype), but it should be extremely rare, and does not affect
char arguments at least on x86.
As for the language standard: I hope that Char will be allowed or
required to have >=30 bits instead of current 16; but never more than
Int, to be able to use ord and chr safely.
--
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