[EXPERIMENTAL] 1st draft of Encode

Please take a look at the (very rough) first draft of Encode, an extension
for character encoding conversions for Perl 5:

        http://www.iki.fi/jhi/Encode.tgz

Download, plop it into the Perl 5.7 source directory, unpack,
re-Configure, rebuild.  (Or, if you have a Perl 5.7 in your path,
cd to ext/Encode, perl Makefile.PL, make).

There isn't anything to test this with (I did say 'very rough').
Please read Encode.pm.  Mainly I'm interested hearing comments whether
this is a good interface, something that could be used to replace
Unicode::Map8 (lots of table-driven conversions, for 8-bit legacy
character sets), and when we feel up to it, Unicode::Map (lot of
algorithmic conversions, for Eastern Asian encodings).  AFAIU, the
current user interface of ::Map8 isn't what we want?

-- 
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
        # There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
        # It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen