Re: [Haskell-cafe] Encoding of Haskell source files

2011/4/4 Brandon Moore :

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From: Michael Snoyman Sent: Mon, April 4, 2011 5:22:02 AM

Firstly, I personally would love to insist on using UTF-8 and be done with it. I

see no reason to bother with other character encodings.

If by "insist", you mean the standard insist that implementations support UTF-8 by default.

No, I mean that compliant compilers should only support UTF-8. I don't see a reason to allow the creation of Haskell files that can only be read by some compilers.

The rest of the standard already just talks about sequences of unicode characters, so I don't see much to be gained by prohibiting other encodings.

In particular, I have read that systems set up for east asian scripts often use UTF-16 as a default encoding.

I don't know about that, but I'd be very surprised if there are any editors out there that don't support UTF-8. If a user is inconvenienced once because he/she needs to change the default encoding to UTF-8, and the result is all Haskell files share the same encoding, I'm OK with that. @Colin: Even if UTF-16 was more space-efficient than UTF-8 (which I highly doubt[1]), I'd be incredibly surprised if this held true for Haskell source, which will almost certainly be at least 90% code-points below 128. For those code points, UTF-16 is twice the size as UTF-8. Michael [1] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2010-August/082268.html