> 1) x.0 release. I haven't seen a x.0 release of _any_ software I was > willing to put the family jewels on without quite a bit of testing > first.
So are you conducting testing? > 2) The very first machine I installed it on immediately had script > breakage _specifically_ because the rather broken (IMHO) behavior > re making the use of either 'use bytes' or 'binmode' mandatory Could you please specify the circumstances of the breakage further? What got broken, what had to be changed? > if you want to get the same filehandle behavior semantics on *nix > boxes that Perl (and virtually all other *nix programs) have had > historically. I don't relish the prospect of identifying essentially > every use of 'open' in every program we have ever written just to > add 'binmode' or 'use bytes' to them to proof them against 5.8.0 > originated dain bramage. When I open a file handle and read a file > I expect (by default) to get _exactly_ what is in the file. If I > want Unicode semantics, I'll explicitly specify them myself > "thenkyouverramuch". I'm afraid here you can't both have your cake and eat it, see below. > Unicode is great - I am a huge believer it - but don't > go mucking up *nix semantics by making 'text mode' filehandles the > default: It _breaks_ things that were running 100% clean under > warnings and strict for years. I've distrusted the trend in Perl for > the last few years to 'magically' try to muck with charset encodings; > 5.8.0 has specifically realized those fears as quite justified. I'm sorry but you are not being very helpful at all. You "distrust" "magic" but you do not really say what behaviour of Perl 5.8.0 you find disturbing. The only obvious 'magic' I can think of is the behaviour where Perl checks your locale settings, and if they indicate use of UTF-8, Perl switches the default encoding of the STD* streams, and any further file opens to UTF-8. This bit of magic was specificially requested by Larry Wall, and also by the Linux "Unicodification" project. Other than that, you *do* need to *explicitly* turn on any encoding conversions on filehandles. Perl doesn't "guess" on input, or do any implicit conversions on output. The other magic I can think of is that Perl scripts can now be saved in BOM-marked UTF-16, and Perl knows how to parse them. The locale-induced UTF-8 magic can lead into situation where you have to explicitly mark your filehandles "binary" (with binmode, please don't use bytes), because otherwise any data going out would be expected to be Unicode, that is, *text*. If you are pushing out binary bits and bytes, you should tell Perl about it. You are also simultaneously complaining about "wanting to specify things yourself" and "having to use binmode"? If you are not affected by the locale UTF-8 magic, all handles are just like they used to be. In this case you do have to explicitly tell that a filehandle is Unicode, just like you say you wanted. Back to the 'UNIX' way of I/O: I'm sorry but I think the UNIX way and the Unicode can't transparently cohabit. I'm very much a UNIX geek and systems programmer, and I like the simple symmetrical world of UNIX I/O, but I cannot see how the byte streams of UNIX and the multiple variable and fixed length encodings of Unicode can work simultaneously without some sort of explicit switching. -- Jarkko Hietaniemi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.iki.fi/jhi/ "There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'." -- Jack Cohen
