Re: BOM and principle of least surprise

Larry Wall <larry(_at_)wall(_dot_)org> writes:
> Right now, the meaning of "text" is subject to severe distortions
> due to legacy issues.  But in the long run, "text" is going to mean
> Unicode, and that probably means a UTF-8 file encoding at least in
> the western world, 
Microsoft seem to be somewhat focused on some 16-bit form.

This thread started as complaint that perl5 can't read a 
script saved as UCS-2/UTF-16 or whatever Windows uses.