Filenames should be assumed to use the locale's encoding by default,
Which is wrong, too. In Win32 and Mac OS X filenames are often Unicode,
but there is no locale setting that would indicate that. Depending on
locale settings is not portable.
Python explicitly distinguishes byte strings and Unicode strings,
which allows the two models to coexist without ambiguity.
I think that (not doing) this was the basic failure of the Perl Unicode
model. We made a valiant attempt at making them the same and allowing
old legacy code to work, and I think we got close, but the scheme could
carry us only so far.
In Perl 6 this (and hopefully Parrot, too) this will be fixed, as far as
I understand.
If Perl scalars are a mixture of ISO-8859-1 and UTF-8, instead of a
mixture of the default locale encoding and UTF-8, how to tell Perl to
recode external strings (default I/O, including stdin/stdout/stderr,
@ARGV, filenames) between the default locale encoding and Perl's
internal encodings?
I would really appreciate if people would run perluniintro, and
perlrun/-C, but I have already given up the hope.
--
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
