What are you talking about? It has nothing to do with Perl. "e" is formed from the code point U+0065, "é" is formed from code point U+00E9 or from code points U+0065 + U+0301, etc. This is defined by The Unicode Consortium, not by Perl.
And the idea that it's OK to treat OCTET 0xE7 as a substitue for code point U+00E9 is totally not defined by the consortium.
No, the input must be a string of integers in 0..255, which it is. print has no problem storing those as bytes. iso-latin-1 doesn't factor into it.
OMG. Who cares what print expects. Even Perl (in other parts) thinks that that's ridiculous. 
 perl -wE 'say "ç" + "ç"'

[download]
The operator plus expects numbers, just like print, right?
If you claim that iso-latin-1 is used, then you claim that use utf8; produces iso-latin-1. It doesn't. It produces Unicode code points.
Printing UNICODE STRINGS (and Perl CAN tell the difference between binary and unicode) on binary STDOUT produces a sequence of octets ENCODED as Latin-1 for code points 0 - 255. The Consortium totally wouldn't approve of that. And that's it. It appears you just don't like the word 'encoding'. Most people would still Perl's behavior 'encoding', that word is certainly good enough for me. You (MAYBE) would've had a point if Perl actually stored unicode codepoint U+00E7 as an octet 0xE7 internally. But we know that it doesn't anyway. Have a nice day.

In reply to Re^5: Default encoding rules leave me puzzled... by Anonymous Monk
in thread Default encoding rules leave me puzzled... by kzwix

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.