carbon-lang/proposals/p0142_decision.md

Decision for: Unicode source files

Proposal accepted on 2020-10-13

Affirming:

• austern
• chandlerc
• geoffromer
• gribozavr
• josh11b
• zygoloid

Abstaining:

• noncombatant
• tituswinters

Rationale

We need to specify the source file encoding in order to move on to higher-level lexical issues, and the proposal generally gives sound rationales for the specific choices it makes. UTF-8 and Unicode Annex 31 are non-controversial choices for a new language in 2020. The proposal provides a good rationale for requiring NFC.

We support treating homoglyphs and confusability as out of scope. We favor of accepting of a wide range of scripts to start, in order to be welcoming to as wide a community as possible, assuming that underhanded code concerns can be adequately addressed outside of the compiler proper.