On Mon, Feb 16, 2004 at 12:51:06PM +0100, Ketil Malde wrote:
Ross Paterson <ross@soi.city.ac.uk> writes:
While Haskell's source charset is specified as Unicode, Haskell source files don't specify the byte encoding they use, so any source file using non-ASCII characters isn't portable.
Perhaps one could have an option/pragma to specify source encoding?
That would be a flexible solution, but it might not be implemented for a while. I think this is what the old \uhhhh escapes (now dropped from Haskell 98) were for. You could use your favourite encoding locally, but convert to a portable form when sending to another locale.
Entrenching Latin-1 would make the move to Unicode more difficult.
Defaulting to Latin-1 may be sensible, though?
It may seem so to western europeans, but others may differ. A case could be made for UTF-8.