Well, I'd go beyond this and say that it would be nice if Perl would use
the system iconv when available - iconv isn't the greatest interface,
but it is generally pretty workable, and if people use the system
capabilities, then you avoid an explosion of tables.
The question here, of course, is whether:
- Perl behaving the same Perl on every system
or
- Perl behaving the same as other programs on a given system
Is more important. It might be necessary to only use the system iconv
on a known set of systems; I believe the GNU iconv data is kept in
sync with libiconv.
The insidious problem with with any given encoding tranforming system is
the non-standardisation of the encoding names.
--
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
# There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
# It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen
