> The character type Char is an enumeration and consists of 256 values,
> conforming to the ISO 8859-1 standard .
>
> One thing is that according to the ISO 8859-1 standard not all 256
> one-byte characters are legal. Thus, the quoted sentence is imprecise.
Aren't they? Which would not be legal? Of course, not all of them
are printable.
> A more important thing is that after restricting the character set to
> ISO 8859-1 the East European programmers not always can use their
> diacritic characters in Haskell programs.
I tried pushing for Unicode. Hbc come with some Unicode libraries
that should work on any platform. I hope we can agree on Unicode
for the next release. Unfortunately even hbc does not accept
Unicode programs yet, it will take some rewriting.
> There is another ISO standard, called 8859-2 or Latin-2, accepted in
> Eastern Europe and commonly used on the Internet. I wonder if the
> language report may take accept that standard too.
The good thing about the current solution is that it is upwards
compatible with Unicode.
Unicode to the people!!
-- Lennart
