I'm been thinking about this hypothetical question lately: could perl ever switch its 'other' internal representation of strings from utf-8 to utf-16?
My initial guess is that it probably couldn't happen without breaking a lot of apps. I think there are too many (sloppy) coding practices which rely on the convenient fact that for characters in the US-ASCII range, Perl will always represent those characters internally as single octets. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
