On Sun, 12 Aug 2001, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote:
> So you think we should declare and document that in future versions
> (5.10?) we should adopt Unicode and UTF-8 across the board, meaning
> that things like chr(), ord(), pack C, unpack C, \xHH should start
> being strictly Unicode and UTF-8? For example, chr(0x41) being the
> Unicode uppercase A, and ord("A") returning 0x41, ***EVERYWHERE***?
> (Naturally, to ease the transition, some sort of conversion tools for
> places like EBCDIC would be needed.)
I'd really rather not do this. Perl 6 is planned to be more character set
& character encoding agnostic than perl 5 is. Which is to say that if you
read in from an EBCDIC source, the data *stays* in EBCDIC, just as we
won't morph Big5, or any of the JIS encodings. Coercion to a common format
(probably Unicode) will likely happen when comparing different character
sets, but if you don't, I don't see why we should convert.
Regardless, mandating a particular *encoding*, such as UTF-8, is not in
the cards. (If we must mandate anything we might mandate 'Unicode', but
certainly not a particular encoding of Unicode)
Dan
