[Haskell-cafe] Encoding of Haskell source files

[Mark Lentczner]

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 3:52 PM, Roel van Dijk <vandijk.roel at gmail.com>wrote:

> I made an official proposal on the haskell-prime list:
>
> http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-prime/2011-April/003368.html
>
> Let's have further discussion there.


I'm not on that mailing list, so I'll comment here:

My only caveat is that the encoding provision should apply when Haskell
source is presented to the compiler as a bare stream of octets. Where
Haskell source is interchanged as a stream of Unicode characters, then
encoding is not relevant -- but may be likely governed by some outer
protocol - and hence may not be UTF-8 but nonetheless invisible at the
Haskell level.

Two examples where this might come into play are:

1) An IDE that stores module source in some database. It would not be
relevant what encoding that IDE and database choose to store the source in
if the source is presented to the integrated compiler as Unicode characters.

2) If a compilation system fetches module source via HTTP (I could imagine a
compiler that chased down included modules directly off of Hackage, say),
then HTTP already has a mechanism (via MIME types) of transmitting the
encoding clearly. As such, there should be no problem if that outer protocol
(HTTP) transmits the source to the compiler via some other encoding. There
is no reason (and only potential interoperability restrictions) to enforce
that UTF-8 be the only legal encoding here.
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