Can we stop the pedantry and have some people go off in a corner and produce a design which:
1) Solves some of the internationalization issues notably those involving unicode and locales. 2) Will work on a decent range of existing and plausible future Windows and Unix boxes. (Embedded systems, mainframes, PDAs, etc. are also worthwhile but since we would not run the full Haskell libraries on them they are of secondary importance.) That is, follow a standard spec if you can but when the spec becomes impossible to use because of some wild generalization which covers situations that will never come up, make a few assumptions based on what real systems do. 3) Can support nearly all of the current Haskell '98 libraries without change and as much as possible of the Hugs-GHC/hslibs/hierarchial libraries with slight changes. This is partly because, for all its faults, the current interface has the virtue of being simple. I envisage a veneer which implements the old interface on top of the new design. That is, the new design might expose all kinds of information about the encoding in the typesystem or through conversion functions or whatever but this complexity could be hidden behind an interface which reads and writes characters and does something plausible when it encounters UTF-32 and friends. 4) Relies on (and plays well with) Haskell'98 and approved addenda. (It's possible to meet this goal by lobbying for other common extensions to become approved addenda.) 5) Someone is going to produce a decent quality implementation for. (Talk is cheap and all that...) This is much easier now that both Hugs and GHC are working from the same source tree for libraries (with suggestions that NHC will follow suit). -- Alastair Reid [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reid Consulting (UK) Limited http://www.reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk/alastair/ _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell
