Should source code be saved in UTF-8 format

Question

How important is it to save your source code in UTF-8 format?

Eclipse on Windows uses CP1252 character encoding by default. The CP1251 format means non UTF-8 charact

Answer 1

What is your goal? Balance your needs against the pros and cons of this choice.

UTF-8 Pros

• allows use of all character literals without \uHHHH escaping

UTF-8 Cons

• using non-ASCII character literals without \uHHHH increases risk of character corruption
  • font and keyboard issues can arise
  • need to document and enforce use of UTF-8 in all tools (editors, compilers build scripts, diff tools)
• beware the byte order mark

ASCII Pros

• character/byte mappings are shared by a wide range of encodings
  • makes source files very portable
  • often obviates the need for specifying encoding meta-data (since the files would be identical if they were re-encoded as UTF-8, Windows-1252, ISO 8859-1 and most things short of UTF-16 and/or EBCDIC)

ASCII Cons

• limited character set
• this isn't the 1960s

Note: ASCII is 7-bit, not "extended" and not to be confused with Windows-1252, ISO 8859-1, or anything else.