[Haskell-cafe] Unicode strings and runCommand / runProcess

[John Goerzen]

Khudyakov Alexey wrote:
>> Actually, the behavior of openFile when given a String with characters >
>> 0xFF is also completely undocumented.  I am not sure what it does with
>> that.  It should probably be the same as runCommand, whatever it is.
>>
> Under unices file names are just array of bytes. There is no notion of encoding 
> at all. It's just matter of interpretation of that array. 

Quite right.  One must be able to pass binary strings, which contain 
anything except \0 and '/' to openFile.  The same goes for runCommand. 
I am uncomfortable, for this reason, with saying that runCommand ought 
to re-encode in the system locale while openFile doesn't.  It is 
preferable to drop characters than to drop the ability to pass arbitrary 
binary data.

So I am not sure I agree with your stance in 
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/4006

-- John