Alisdair: Done!

Jens: I shuffled things around, hopefully, that helps. I think we want to keep the definition.

Thiago: We achieve 2 things: all compilers will have to support utf8 (including IBMs compiler etc) 2/ they will handle it correctly - rather than randomly insert replacement characters in phase 1 like some currently do.

The hurdle to "utf8 is the default" is that it is out of scope of the standard 2/existing code 3/automatic detection is problematic. We do not want to force people to use BOM everywhere.

Tom is working on some kind of mechanism to put in the source file what the encoding of that file is, but, I don't think using that for utf8 is the right default either as most code is utf8 already.

So the solution is to do exactly what Qt does, put the flag in the build system!

We also hope that this will send a signal to users "you should really consider using utf-8" !