On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 10:38 AM Lassi Kortela <xxxxxx@lassi.io> wrote:

It's nice to be able to do that, but maybe it shouldn't be a comment.
After all, it could contain metadata that is useful to read from Lisp
and much of the point of S-expression syntax is that it's extensible
like this. If we make it a comment, it's just a glorified version of the
original magic comments hack :-/

True.
 
For implementations that don't support it, skipping the thing is a
one-line macro:

That works in a file of plain code, but in a library file, which typically has just a library or define-library form, it won't.

But overall I think this approach is beating the air.  UTF-8 is so dominant that even Microsoft, which resisted it for so long, is slowly getting the point:  <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_in_Microsoft_Windows#UTF-8> is enlightening.  I think we should leave source file encodings unspecified in the standard and not worry about legacy encodings too much (everything but UTF-8 and its direct subset plain ASCII is now legacy).


John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        xxxxxx@ccil.org
        Sound change operates regularly to produce irregularities;
        analogy operates irregularly to produce regularities.
                --E.H. Sturtevant, ca. 1945, probably at Yale