Alan v3.0 beta8 is now available. You can view the details of the changes in the Changes Section. You are encouraged to update to this latest release.

The major change is extended support for various national characters by adding support for UTF-8 (a character encoding scheme). It supplements the current ISO8859-1 that Alan hitherto has supported. Support for ISO8859-1 is getting less and less main stream so it was time to do something about this.

If your files (Alan source, solution files) have a UTF-8 BOM they will automatically be considered to use UTF-8, otherwise you need to give explicit options to the compiler and interpreter to have this functionality.

FUTURE: In the next beta release all files will by default be considered in UTF-8 encoding, unless you use special options. So beta8 is the first step in migrating Alan into UTF-8.