Re: character set encoding of scheme source files

On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 7:02 AM, Jonathan Rees <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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?

(prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)

Although for the sake of other users who don't
necessarily assume utf-8 you may want to keep
a habit of adding "coding: utf-8" to files that have
non-ASCII characters.

-- 
Alex