perl-unicode

Re: perlunitut - feedback appreciated

2001-11-11 14:43:49
On Sun, Nov 11, 2001 at 12:57:27PM -0800, Edward Cherlin wrote:
Thanks. The Perl implementors and you have done a very good job. I have a
few suggestions and one complaint.

The most important issue is chr().

Note that C<chr(...)> for arguments less than 0x100 (decimal 256) will
return an eight-bit character for backward compatibility with older
Perls (in ISO 8859-1 platforms it can be argued to be producing
Unicode even then, just not Unicode encoded in UTF-8 -- the ISO 8859-1
is equivalent to the first 256 characters of Unicode).  For C<chr()>
arguments of 0x100 or more, Unicode will always be produced.

My complaint: There should be a pure Unicode alternative to this kludge.
Obviously, it is not hard to write one in Perl, but it should be part of the
implementation.

Note that for most of the time, the difference whether chr() generates
ISO 8859-1 or UTF-8 encoded Unicode for the range 0x80..0xff shouldn't
matter, since the upgrading of the 8-bit to UTF-8 is automatic.

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

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