> > 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.
I agree it should be done. But not for 4.07; we can start breaking the tree
as soon as I've forked the 4.07 branch though (hopefully today...).
We have some other small wibbles to deal with; currently a Char never
resides in the heap, because there are only 256 possible Chars we declare
them all statically in the RTS. Now we have to check whether the Char falls
in the allowed range before using this table (that's fairly easy, we already
do this for Int).
Cheers,
Simon
