On 06-Aug-2002, George Russell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Converting CStrings to [Word8] is probably a bad idea anyway, since there is > absolutely no reason to assume a C character will be only 8 bits long, and > under some implementations it isn't.
That's true in general; the C standard only guarantees that a C character will be at least 8 bits long. But Posix now guarantees that C's `char' is exactly 8 bits. Posix hasn't taken over the world yet, and doesn't look like doing so in the near future. So Haskell should not limit itself to being only implementable on Posix systems. However, systems which don't have 8-bit bytes are getting very very rare nowadays -- it might well be reasonable for Haskell, like Posix, to limit itself to only being implementable on systems where C's `char' is exactly 8 bits. -- Fergus Henderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | "I have always known that the pursuit The University of Melbourne | of excellence is a lethal habit" WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh> | -- the last words of T. S. Garp. _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
