How do we change the interpretation of a string?
It is all very well trying to make the type of a string
implicit information calculable by clever insight. But it is
also important to allow the programmer control over their data
by making the information explicit too. Perl is never going to
get it right all the time automagically. And my example above,
Indeed perl could use this facility, particularly in situations where
your default coded character set has odd traits such as these:
$ perl -e 'for (split(//,"ABCDEFGHIJ")){print ord($_)," "}'
193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 209 $
Summary: The effort to make utf8 support implicit is excellent,
but we also need explicit control for those situations where
Perl is not going to make it, or isn't there yet.
Thanks for saying that. So how do I turn on HINT_BYTE instead of
HINT_UTF8 throught the compile of perl? Note that the one-liner given
above was 5.005_03 not 5.6.0. I would like to be able to compile 5.6.0
again on OS/390.
Peter Prymmer
