The 'in-place' stuff is a slight pain - these thing become chop-like.
I cannot just say
syswrite(Handle,chars_to_utf8(join(' ',map( { ...} ))));
But I guess the function style makes it hard to test for error cases.
Yes, and if errors can be of several kinds.
Another reason is that I wavered for a long while between function-style
and in-place. Some are naturally in-place like on_utf8(). For consistency
I chose in-place.
As this is a _perl_ API why cannot we return the string and use
length() on it if we want to know that?
Go ahead. :-)
--
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# There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
# It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen