George Russell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Ketil wrote (quoting Ken)
>>> On most machines, Char will be a wrapper around Word8. (This >>> contradicts the present language standard.) >> Can you point out any machine where this is not the case? One with a >> Haskell implementation, or likely to have one in the future > That's easy enough. On Sun/Solaris (which I use and which came out as > being very popular on the Haskell survey) characters are SIGNED, so the > values run from -128 to 127 and the wrapper would be not Word8 but Int8. How does the file system know the difference? I think you mean that C chars on Solaris are signed, not that files and sockets don't contain octets. > I think this demonstrates the perils of saying "It's safe to assume > everything is 8 bit because everything is now". I don't think it does so at all. There may be a peril in assuming octet IO, but frankly I think trying to anticipate different futures will only make things messy, and have a great likelyhood of turning out useless anyway. Remember, worse is better. -kzm -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
