Re: Haskell character set
> 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! Well, if the accented letters are among "aeiouy" then she already can. If the implementation you use doesn't accept that then it's not a Haskell implementation. -- Lennart PS. dogbert% cat Name.hs infixl 7 ? x ? y = div x y eAA?CDNO?Y??aa?cdno?y?y = 42 main = print (eAA?CDNO?Y??aa?cdno?y?y ? 2) dogbert% hbc Name.hs dogbert% a.out 21 dogbert%
Re: Haskell character set
> 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
Haskell character set
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): 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. 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. Of course, when it comes to real programming most of us use English names. Still, diacritic characters are important both in education and in printed materials. 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. Consequently, I suggest changes in the standard library module Char. A more appropriate name for it would be Char-Latin-1. But, even if the name remains unchanged the comments in the source text should reflect the fact that the utilities have been written with Latin-1 (or 8859-1) in mind. Most of us in Europe suffer from having all those extra accents, tails and other fancy decorations with our letters. The ISO 8859 standards help to cope with them on computers. 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. Greetings, Rysiek
Re: Haskell character set
> 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
