SHELL text encoding OS X?

[hh]

> ... the OS X shell assumes text is UTF-8 encoded whereas Livecode on OS X assumes text is MacRoman encoded.

Close to that: YOUR shell assumes that. From the default MacOS X installation all encodings can be set that are shown by locale -m in terminal. Often used (at least temporarily) is also ISO8859-1 by users coming from Win, using documents from their archives.

We cannot even assume UTF-8 for the default-installation Mac user, only for the default-installation-default-charset user (from Silicon valley).