[Haskell-cafe] Language simplicity

[Andrew Coppin]

Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
> On Jan 13, 2010, at 14:25 , Andrew Coppin wrote:
>> Colin Paul Adams wrote:
>>>    Andrew> It's weird that us Haskell people complain about there
>>>    Andrew> being only 26 letters in the alphabet
>>>
>>> Which alphabet?
>>> You have plenty of choice in Unicode.
>>
>> Er... I was under the impression that Haskell source code uses the 
>> ASCII character set, not Unicode.
>
> The Report would beg to differ with you; see section 2.1.  "Haskell 
> uses the Unicode [11] character set. However, source programs are 
> currently biased toward the ASCII character set used in earlier 
> versions of Haskell ."  ("Currently" at the time being 1998.  Unicode 
> is more prevalent these days.)

So... how would GHC tell which of the hundreds of millions of possible 
character encodings is in use?

>> (And even if that's not the case, I've yet to find a way to type in 
>> the Unicode characters which are hypothetically possible.)
>
> That's a problem with your editor/development environment.

Or rather, the problem with every computer system known to man?