Re: character set encoding of scheme source files

On Oct 27, 2012, at 9:50 AM, Michael Sperber wrote:

> Jonathan Rees <[email protected]> writes:
> 
>> Mike: I noticed the presence of an apparent u-umlaut in your recent
>> Scheme 48 sources. This raises an interesting question for me: How are
>> various parts of the ecosystem supposed to know what the character set
>> encoding of scheme files is? The question hasn't come up much
>> previously because Scheme is so retro (or provincial) that most source
>> files so far are encoded in 7-bit ASCII, which is a subset shared
>> among UTF-8, Latin-1, etc., so until now it just hasn't mattered.
> 
> It's come up, and I don't have a good answer yet: The default encoding
> of source files is Latin-1.  While the system is capable of reading
> other encodings, there's no easy way to influence that setting.  But
> it's on my list.  My personal preference is for moving to UTF-8
> eventually.

Mine too.

> As to the Latin-1 u-umlaut, I was quite consciously following your lead
> of putting a © (copyright) character in, for example, doc/deriving.txt
> from 0.58.

That was before I (we?) saw the Unicode light.

Is there a way to tell emacs to switch to a UTF-8 default for everything? And a way to hack at the Scheme 48 sources (off label) to make it do the same?

Thanks
Jonathan

> -- 
> Regards,
> Mike
>