[Haskell-cafe] Encoding of Haskell source files

[Michael Snoyman]

2011/4/4 Brandon Moore <brandon_m_moore at yahoo.com>:
>>From: Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com>
>>Sent: Mon, April 4, 2011 5:22:02 AM
>>
>>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.
>
> If by "insist", you mean the standard insist that implementations support
> UTF-8 by default.

No, I mean that compliant compilers should only support UTF-8. I don't
see a reason to allow the creation of Haskell files that can only be
read by some compilers.

> The rest of the standard already just talks about sequences of unicode
> characters, so I don't see much to be gained by prohibiting other encodings.
>
> In particular, I have read that systems set up for east asian scripts
> often use UTF-16 as a default encoding.

I don't know about that, but I'd be very surprised if there are any
editors out there that don't support UTF-8. If a user is
inconvenienced once because he/she needs to change the default
encoding to UTF-8, and the result is all Haskell files share the same
encoding, I'm OK with that.

@Colin: Even if UTF-16 was more space-efficient than UTF-8 (which I
highly doubt[1]), I'd be incredibly surprised if this held true for
Haskell source, which will almost certainly be at least 90%
code-points below 128. For those code points, UTF-16 is twice the size
as UTF-8.

Michael

[1] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2010-August/082268.html