Ketil Z Malde wrote: > > George Russell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > "Ketil Z. Malde" wrote: > > [snip] > > >>> and on Solaris the default representation of a characters is as a > >>> signed quantity. > > >> Why should we care? > > > If you want to talk to any C libraries or C programs which use > > characters, which some of us do. GNU readline and regex come to > > mind. > > Yes, which is why we all agree on CChar for FFI purposes. > But we were discussing IO, weren't we? Well for example I mentioned regex. Using a different sort of char will potentially break regex, since it means the meaning of a range of characters [A..B] will change if A and B have different signs. So either RegexString will have to do complicated transformations of the regular expression string to fix this (you will need to buy Simon Marlow several drinks) or else the manual will have to admit that the ordering used by RegexString differs from that used anywhere else.
This is just something that comes to mind, there are probably lots of other cases where C libraries we might want to interface to provide things which depend on the order of char. _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
