I understand the argument you're making, but I disagree about the word "compatible". I think a more accurate way of saying it is "Perl does not assume a unicode environment", "the unicode support is opt-in", and "getting Perl to treat its environment as unicode requires a lot of tedious steps".

For contrast, Python 3 does assume a unicode environment, giving people that convenient out-of-the-box support feel, but Python 2 did not, and it caused a great deal of breakage to change that assumption. Perl will probably never change the default, in order to maintain backward compatibility. There are many environments that really still aren't Unicode, and Perl still needs to run in those. There are in fact many more environments Perl can run in than Python, because of that.

I do wish, though, that there was a simpler option like an environment variable or command line switch that would make Perl assume a unicode environment. That option would probably break a bunch of modules and scripts, and would still need to be opt-in, but people could gradually start supporting it in the same way that we can run perl with Taint checking and see what that breaks. Most importantly though, having it be a single switch rather than dozens of switches all over would make a massive difference for convenience.

In reply to Re^6: Converting Unicode by NERDVANA
in thread Converting Unicode by BernieC

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