Yes, I second your comments. Besides working correctly, perl 5.8 also adds a couple of nifty features. For example, it lets you conveniently set the input and output character sets for a filehandle and will take care of all the necessary encoding for you. And it adds more alphabet/character classes for regexps.

One thing I disliked about 5.6.1 was that it was impossible to tell it that I want my in- and output as UTF-8. In some situations, it kept on treating my UTF-8-encoded input as raw 8-bit characters and tried to encode them as UTF-8 *again* when printing them to STDOUT... While I could solve my problems, it took me a while to work around it.

perl 5.6.0 was worse. I did a simple module to convert Chinese traditional characters to simplified ones (Yes, I know there are two on CPAN already, but I had a good reason to do so), using a conversion table in a hash. For whatever reason, 5.6.0 would produce malformed characters, but only in some cases -- on 5.6.1 it works fine.

Now the only problem I'm facing is... writing my scripts so they will work well (or fail gracefully) with 5.8.0, 5.6.1, 5.6.0 etc...