Re: (random) musings on I/O disciplines

At 02:55 PM 9/27/00 -0400, Andy Dougherty wrote:
>On Wed, 27 Sep 2000, Dan Sugalski wrote:
>
> > Well, the impression I get from Larry is that he wants the internals to be
> > character-formatting neutral. Scalars should be able to provide their
> > contents in a number of different formats, but perl would usually not have
> > One True Format internally.
>
> > I think the intention is that if data comes in in ASCII or EBCDIC or
> > Unicode or Shift-JIS or binary or whatever then perl will keep it that way
> > if it understands the format, and convert as needed by bits of the core.
>
>This seems sensible, but "convert as needed" is going to be the tricky
>part:-) and we'll need to allow for appropriate directives to keep the
>DWIMmer from getting confused in unusual situations.

Perl will, presumably, know how to go from A to B, and deal with that. If 
you do something that wants UTF8 and your scalar's got EBCDIC data in it, 
then perl will do the conversion on the fly.

>I don't think there's any real disagreement on these ideas, but there is
>one additional issue that I think hasn't been fully appreciated:
>
>I want to be able to do all this *without* having to become a Unicode
>expert (or even Unicode-literate).

I expect that Larry'll get it right. I also want it really easy to not have 
to bother, since my data sources are all plain ASCII too.

I have no doubt that Simon and I will have plenty of fun going back and 
forth on this one... :)


					Dan

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Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
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