[Haskell-cafe] Encoding of Haskell source files

[Roel van Dijk]

2011/4/4 Ketil Malde <ketil at malde.org>:
> I think the safest thing to do is to require source to be ASCII, and
> provide escapes for code points >127...

I do not think that that is the safest option. The safest is just
writing down whatever GHC does. Escape codes for non-ASCII would break
a lot of packages and make programming really painful. Consider the
following, utf-8 encoded, file:

http://code.haskell.org/numerals/test/Text/Numeral/Language/ZH/TestData.hs

I don't want to imagine writing that with escape characters. It would
also be very error prone, not being able to readily read what you
write.

But the overall consensus appears to be UTF-8 as the default encoding.
I will write an official proposal to amend the haskell language
specification. (Probably this evening, utc+1).