If I'm writing C, and do dumb things with pointers like: 
void function1() {
  float x, y, z;
  function2(&x);
}

void function2(float *point) {
  point[2]= 5;
}

[download]
That is unspecified behavior. It doesn't generate a warning, and on some hosts it will work and on other hosts it will not work (or even crash) depending on how the compiler chose the internal representation. It isn't a "bug" in the C language, but it's certainly a footgun.

My understanding of Perl's filesystem rules are that the programmer is responsible for performing encoding on every string prior to passing it to the OS, using their knowledge of the OS. If you skip that encoding step (as most of us do, because there's no easy universal facility for us to know which encoding the host is using) then you run the risk of undefined behavior, which may manifest itself differently depending on internal details of the string.

I think it would be very nice to have a facility to know how to encode filesystem strings, and a library that performs that job so that doing it right is easier than not. I wouldn't consider that library to be working around a bug, but rather supplying a missing feature of the language.

In reply to Re^5: how are ARGV and filename strings represented? by NERDVANA
in thread how are ARGV and filename strings represented? by almr

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