[Colin Paul Adams] Re: Proposal: Define UTF-8 to be the encoding of Haskell source files

[Roel van Dijk]

On 7 April 2011 11:29, Christian Maeder <Christian.Maeder at dfki.de> wrote:
> I agree that Haskell files should be UTF-8, but I also agree that it is only
> relevant for Hackage (and Cabal) and already enforced by ghc-6.12. or
> higher.

It is relevant for all tools and systems which process Haskell sources.

> The motivation for this proposal can only be that future cabal packages will
> use more and more non-ASCII characters as is possible via
> http://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-unicode-symbols-0.2.1.4 and
> LANGUAGE pragma "UnicodeSyntax" (that happens to have no support for "\" as
> lambda symbol - probably because lambda is a letter and no symbol!)

The motivation for this proposal is interoperability of all tools and
systems which process Haskell source files. Perhaps I could have made
that more clear.

> However, I think, these extra characters only make sense for corner cases
> and should not be recommended for general purposes.

Please take a look at the following file:
http://code.haskell.org/numerals/src/Text/Numeral/Language/ZH.hs

I have many more like that. I do not consider Chinese a corner case.
Nor the vast amount of languages which can not be represented using
ASCII.

> So my view is: Stick to ASCII and only if you must (not just for casual
> reasons) use UTF-8.

When to use certain characters is not part of the proposal.