System.IO.latin1 docs

[Simon Meier]

2011/3/30 Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>

> On 30/03/2011 10:58, Simon Meier wrote:
>
>  In the 'bytestring' library, String handling based on this encoding is
>> provided by the  Data.ByteString.Char8 module and its lazy cousin.
>> Therefore, I'd suggest to name this non-standard (or is there a
>> standard?) encoding
>>
>> char8 :: TextEncoding
>>
>> Apart from historical reasons, I also prefer this name as it conveys
>> more information about its semantics.
>>
>
> There's a clash here as we already use the term "binary" elsewhere in the
> System.IO API: openBinaryFile, hSetBinary.  So, it's not clear to me that
> being consistent with Data.ByteString is better than being consistent with
> System.IO.  On the other hand, "char8" is a better name than "binary".  I
> don't feel strongly either way here.
>

Ah, I didn't see that. However, if I recall correctly, the long-term plan is
to introduce a separate type for binary files. I would expect that the
caller has to explicitly specify an encoding when writing a String to such a
binary file. However, there still might be uses of text file handles with a
'char8' encoding. Hence, in the long-term, we can actually avoid confusion
by not choosing 'binary' as the name of this encoding.

best regards,
Simon
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