[bitc-dev] initial interest

[Sam Mason]

On Fri, Dec 02, 2005 at 03:26:37PM +0600, Constantine Plotnikov wrote:
> I'm from Russia. And I can testify that the world is not limited to US. 
> Even in Europe there are about 5 different 8-bit ISO encoding for 
> characters specific for different languages (and there are much more 
> non-ISO ones).

I think I was a bit quick off the mark with complaining about this.
I thought about it for a day or so before sending the email off, but
on the way into work this morning and came to the conclusion that I'm
getting confused.  Haskell's file I/O is with strings, as opposed to
octets or something more abstract like Storables.  And I think my brain
had associated this with having 32bit Unicode chars rather than the
natural place, the file I/O.

Have you seen ISO/IEC 2022 aka ECMA-35, it's even more fun in that it's
statefull.  I don't think I've come across it much, but apparently it's
very common (more so than UTF-8) in some bits of the world.  The thread
I linked to before talks about it a bit:

  http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2004-September/006796.html

It's going to be a long time before BitC starts to worry about file I/O,
but I'll try and remember my concerns for then.


  Sam