[Haskell-beginners] Cross-platform .hs files on Linux and Windows

[Vinay Sajip]

Daniel Fischer <daniel.is.fischer <at> googlemail.com> writes:

> That's by design. GHC treats a shebang line as a comment *if the shebang is 
> the very first bytes of the file*.
> With a BOM, the shebang isn't the start of the file, so it's not treated as 
> a comment.
> 
> You might change the ticket to a feature request.
> 

I'll leave it to the Trac administrators to handle as they see fit, but I find
it hard to believe this is "by design". Of course, tools like Notepad can be
viewed as a little broken because they prepend the BOM, but that's behaviour
that can't be completely avoided on Windows. It seems easy enough to check for a
BOM and skip that, because the BOM is not strictly part of the file contents;
it's just a marker indicating the encoding. The shebang line in the non-working
example is the very first thing in the file's actual contents (e.g. as
interpreted by Notepad).

Of course, for UTF-16/UCS-2 encoded files (also common on Windows), wouldn't the
compiler need to check for a BOM anyway?

Regards,

Vinay Sajip