[Haskell-cafe] Re: UTF-8 BOM, really!? (was: Re: File path progr amme)

[Aaron Denney]

On 2005-01-31, Bayley, Alistair <Alistair_Bayley at ldn.invesco.com> wrote:
>> From: Aaron Denney [mailto:wnoise at ofb.net] 
>> 
>> Better yet would be to have the standard never allow the BOM.
>> 
>> Since some things can't handle it, on output we should never emit it,
>> but still must handle it on input.  Bah.
>
>
> I don't see how banning it from input would help; as I understand it, it's
> meant to be ignored anyway, so there's no loss or gain there.

Backwards compatibility, e.g. Kernel looking for the two bytes '#!' at
the beginning of a shell script.  UTF-8 was supposed to be for backwards
compatibility with ASCII with minimal fuss.  Having to handle a BOM
transparently at the beginning is no longer minimal fuss.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-