Lots of discussion on Unicode in Perl recently.
(I didn’t see any retraction from Nelson, respectful or otherwise, though)
I can’t see what is wrong with the (brand newish) utf8 pragma approach especially when all the issues are ironed out. You don’t want to break backwards compatibility and give folks any more reason not to upgrade to later versions of Perl.
I’d argue that because it doesn’t come with perl out of the box it isn’t a general solution.
Also the recent unicode discussion actually was highlighting real failures in OTHER languages to let you handle malformed data properly. Unfortunately if you read the blogs of many pythonistas they don’t seem to understand this.
Hi,
I don’t agree with your first point. There are no XML parsers as core modules either, and Moose is non-core. Still, Perl has a first-in-class object system and excels at XML parsing.
I didn’t see the pythonistas side of the argument, but I’m not surprised they have similar problems.