2011/4/4 Roel van Dijk
<vandijk.roel@gmail.com>
Hello,
The Haskell 2010 language specification states that "Haskell uses
the Unicode character set" [1]. I interpret this as saying that,
at the lowest level, a Haskell program is a sequence of Unicode
code points. The standard doesn't say how such a sequence should
be encoded. You can argue that the encoding of source files is
not part of the language. But I think it would be highly
practical to standardise on an encoding scheme.
Strictly speaking it is not possible to reliably exchange Haskell
source files on the byte level. If I download some package from
hackage I can't tell how the source files are encoded from just
looking at the files.
Not from looking with your eyes perhaps. Does that matter? Your text editor, and the compiler, can surely figure it out for themselves. There aren't many Unicode encoding formats, and there aren't very many possibilities for the leading characters of a Haskell source file, are there?