I agree that use utf8; would be better.

> which saves this as UTF-8, then $micro is a string of two characters,

don't you mean one character encoded with 2 bytes? °

> To make it more interesting

the most interesting thing is that he wisely used pre-tags and not code-tags, because code-sections here fail with utf-8 characters ... :/

update

°) OK, you mean when Perl loads this file, it will interpret the 2 bytes as 2 random characters, because use utf8 is missing. Yes!