Some more thoughts that came to my mind while we were walking the dog... Those whose think switching UTF-8 based on locale settings should spend some time with the Redhat bug database. RH 8 and 9 used an early prerelease version of Perl 5.8.0, which did switch on fully UTF-8-ness based on locale settings. This turned out to be quite a mess because RH8/9 had *by default* such locales - *every* RH8/9 user was subjected to full UTF-8, e.g. UTF-8 I/O.
As far for the Latin-1 (or EBCDIC, if on EBCDIC) being silently the default, yes, that was a mistake, a culturally insensitive mistake at that. But there is a simple workaround for that, as perluniintro would tell you: the encoding pragma. A further helper is the encoding::warnings pragma from Autrijus Tang, you can find it from CPAN. Summary: I think Unicode is complex enough, and different users and developers have different levels of expectations and needs, and different levels of understanding what Unicode means, and assuming one wants to have any level of backward compatibility, that there simply is no one single set of "right things" to choose when implementing Unicode support. The best one can hope is to build enough knobs the users can pull and twist, to adjust to the level of Unicodeness they want and need and understand.
