It would only a backwards compatibility issue if you accept that UTF-8 is the ONLY encoding used in computing. It’s not even a common default yet. Ruby’s Unicode support was terrible and is only made passable by installing some specific gems and even then it’s not as good as Perl. Here’s an overview from tchrist: http://dheeb.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/gbu.pdf.

Christiansen also once published a Yes/No style table of all the languages and Perl was by far the best among Java/Python/Ruby/PHP. I’m sorry I could not find this table again to link.

In reply to Re^2: Matching/replacing a unicode character only works after decode() by Your Mother
in thread Matching/replacing a unicode character only works after decode() by FloydATC

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