Michael Snoyman
My guess is that a large subset of Haskell modules start with one of left brace (starting with comment or language pragma), m (for starting with module), or some whitespace character. So it *might* be feasible to take a guess at things. But as I said before: I like UTF-8. Is there anyone out there who has a compelling reason for writing their Haskell source in EBCDIC?
Probably not EBCDIC. :-) Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think nobody has compelling reasons for using any other Unicode format than UTF-8. Although some systems use UTF-16 (or some approximation thereof) internally, UTF-8 seems to be the universal choice external encoding. However, there probably exists a bit of code using Latin-1 and Windows charsets, and here leading characters aren't going to help you all that much. I think the safest thing to do is to require source to be ASCII, and provide escapes for code points >127... -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants