what makes so hard to implement real unicode pragma?

Bear in mind that many people are not ready (or don't need) to pursue the use of unicode; and many of these people are dependent on Perl behaving a particular way with regard to handling i/o that is not strictly limited to ASCII characters.

These people would be severely and negatively surprised if they discovered that by installing the next version of Perl, all of their existing scripts would need to be modified in order to preserve their original behaviors with regard to file i/o.

(That actually happened once, with the introduction of Perl 5.8.0 on RedHat Linux: the particular RedHat release used utf-8 locale settings for the "default" shell environment, and that version of Perl used the locale settings in order to decide what the default i/o layer should be. Mayhem ensued because scripts that had worked previously were suddenly creating garbage. As a result, the Perl 5.8.1 release did not rely directly on locale settings for its default i/o layer selection.)

In reply to Re: Pragma to handle unicode characters by graff
in thread Pragma to handle unicode characters by wanradt

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