[Haskell-cafe] Encoding of Haskell source files

[Roel van Dijk]

On 4 April 2011 12:22, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com> wrote:
> Firstly, I personally would love to insist on using UTF-8 and be done with
> it. I see no reason to bother with other character encodings.

This is also my preferred choice.

> There *is* an algorithm for determining the encoding of an XML file based on
> a combination of the BOM (Byte Order Marker) and an assumption that the file
> will start with a XML declaration (i.e., <?xml ... ?>). But this isn't
> capable of determining every possible encoding on the planet, just
> distinguishing amongst varieties of UTF-(8|16|32)/(big|little) endian and
> EBCIDC. It cannot tell the difference between UTF-8, Latin-1, and
> Windows-1255 (Hebrew), for example.

I think I was confused between character encodings in general and
Unicode encodings.

> I think the implication of "Unicode encoding formats" is something in the
> UTF family. An encoding like Latin-1 or Windows-1255 can be losslessly
> translated into Unicode codepoints, but it's not exactly an encoding of
> Unicode, but rather a subset of Unicode.

That would validate Colin's point about there not being that many encodings.

> My guess is that a large subset of Haskell modules start with one of left
> brace (starting with comment or language pragma), m (for starting with
> module), or some whitespace character. So it *might* be feasible to take a
> guess at things. But as I said before: I like UTF-8. Is there anyone out
> there who has a compelling reason for writing their Haskell source in
> EBCDIC?

I think I misinterpreted the word 'leading'. I thought Colin meant
"most used". The set of characters with which Haskell programmes start
is indeed small. But like you I prefer no guessing and just default to
UTF-8.