> I would like to complain about an unfortunate approach taken by the
> authors of Haskell concerning the character type. The Haskell 1.4
> Report says (and the 1.3 version was saying the same):
> [.... complain that Haskell uses ISO Latin-1 standard ...]
> A more radical solution comes, of
> course, with Unicode. I wonder if functional languages aren't better
> suited for making use of it than others in which the representation of
> a string is so heavily memory-related. By saying that a string is just
> a list of characters (almost :-) nothing remains to be done with
> string-manipulating functional applications when the representation of
> characters changes.
I agree completely. I think we should follow the way that is already paved
by Java.
Take a look at Arnold and Gosling's "The Java Programming Language"
on page 92. Imagine how great our programs look when we can write
greek letters and other nice squiggols. I think this is especially relevant
in a functional language as we pretend that they are "mathematical".
I have a dream that one day my daughter will be able to use her name
(which contains two grave accents) as a valid Haskell identifier!
Erik Meijer
