Yes, it is equivalent, but that doesn't create the existence of iso-8859-1 as a default. Default indicates a choice, something that can be changed. This is a side-effect of a bug in the user's code, not a default.

It would require Perl to keep track of what is a byte and what is a codepoint

Even if you added a new type of data, I don't see how that helps. How can "É" match a byte? (Upd: Well, I suppose you could add a pragma to specify the encoding to use when Perl needs text from bytes, but wouldn't that break @- and pos? So how would /g work? What about captures? They currently only capture from the supplied string, but that would have to be changed. Unless you're suggesting that the data in scalar actually changes when the decoding happens? Yeah, I've been working on this. )

(And it should probably be "byte, decoded text or unknown", if only for backwards compatibility.)

In reply to Re^5: Windows-1252 characters from \x{0080} thru \x{009f} (source-code encoding) by ikegami
in thread Windows-1252 characters from \x{0080} thru \x{009f} by Jim

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