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. I propose a few solutions: A - Choose a single encoding for all source files. This is wat GHC does: "GHC assumes that source files are ASCII or UTF-8 only, other encodings are not recognised" [2]. UTF-8 seems like a good candidate for such an encoding. B - Specify encoding in the source files. Start each source file with a special comment specifying the encoding used in that file. See Python for an example of this mechanism in practice [3]. It would be nice to use already existing facilities to specify the encoding, for example: {-# ENCODING <encoding name> #-} An interesting idea in the Python PEP is to also allow a form recognised by most text editors: # -*- coding: <encoding name> -*- C - Option B + Default encoding Like B, but also choose a default encoding in case no specific encoding is specified. I would further like to propose to specify the encoding of haskell source files in the language standard. Encoding of source files belongs somewhere between a language specification and specific implementations. But the language standard seems to be the most practical place. This is not an official proposal. I am just interested in what the Haskell community has to say about this. Regards, Roel [1] - http://www.haskell.org/onlinereport/haskell2010/haskellch2.html#x7-150002.1 [2] - http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0-latest/html/users_guide/separate-compila... [3] - http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0263/