Re: those funny non-ASCII characters

[Xah Lee]

On May 31, 10:43 pm, rusi <rustompm...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jun 1, 9:23 am, Jason Rumney <jasonrum...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On Thursday, 31 May 2012 01:15:11 UTC+8, Buchs, Kevin  wrote:
> > > Xah suggested I embrace Unicode. So I could use (prefer-coding-system
> > > 'utf-8) or the file variable: -*- coding: utf-8 -*-. Are there drawbacks
> > > to the former? What about opening an ASCII coded file? Can emacs
> > > properly detect it or does it come up as UTF-8?
>
> > ASCII is a subset of UTF-8, so the problem you are imagining does not exist.
>
> This does not exactly work that way on windows.
> eg recently saw a description of how notepad put a BOM mark in a
> haskell-script which made the haskell scripts unrunnable

haskell compiler probably should bear the blame. Last i read (~4 years
ago), the lang spec says source code should be unicode (i forgot if it
specified a encoding), however, no haskell compiler at the time
supports it. If your lang spec says unicode, you have to support BOM
mark.

〈Unicode BOM Byte Order Mark Hack〉
http://xahlee.org/comp/unicode_BOM_byte_orde_mark.html

http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#bom1

 Xah