perl-unicode

Re: Keeping byte-wise processing as an option

2004-01-03 04:30:05
If it were just me, that would be easy. But stating on an FAQ
page 'use Perl 5.8.1 or later' for something that worked
probably even in Perl 4 doesn't look like a good idea.

Perl 4? And here I was being afraid that getting 5.6 to work right would be tricky... :-) I think we need to define "work" here. I think you meant
by "working" something like "how can I be certain (portably across Perl
versions) that my script is only ever processing bytes, and only bytes",
while I was thinking by "working" something like "able to process Unicode".

(Not that even Perl _1_ couldn't be made to _process_ Unicode, but I guess
I meant "builtin support" by "able".)

Off-hand I can say that getting both 5.6 and 5.8 work at the same time
may be impossible in spots simply because 5.6 was badly unfinished as
regards to Unicode.  No, it won't get fixed.  Beyond 5.8, I don't.

Sorry, I think you missed something in the last sentence. Did you
want to say "I don't know?".

Yes, something like that.

Yes, that seems to do the job. But is this available in 5.0 or earlier?

Certainly not. It's not even available (does not come standard) before 5.6,
and IIRC "use" came in at 5.0.

--
Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi(_at_)iki(_dot_)fi> http://www.iki.fi/jhi/ "There is this special
biologist word we use for 'stable'.  It is 'dead'." -- Jack Cohen