Since the strings passed to those were created by assigning each byte to a character, each byte is taken to be a Unicode code point. Not an iso-8859-1 character.

The act of interpreting a byte as a Unicode codepoint is exactly equivalent to decoding it as Latin-1. Which is why people say "Perl assumes ISO-8859-1", and that isn't wrong.

Because there is no default, it also means the default cannot be changed, to cp1252 or anything else.

Such a change is possible, though not as easy as it sounds. It would require Perl to keep track of what is a byte and what is a codepoint, which would be a major departure from the current model (but inevitable in the long run, IMHO).

Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed

In reply to Re^4: Windows-1252 characters from \x{0080} thru \x{009f} (source-code encoding) by moritz
in thread Windows-1252 characters from \x{0080} thru \x{009f} by Jim

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