Re: BOM and principle of least surprise
[email protected] (Jarkko Hietaniemi)
| Newsgroups | perl.unicode |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Paul Hoffman wrote: > At 2:17 PM -0800 3/31/04, Larry Wall wrote: > >>Perl 6 will assume that script is in some kind of recognizable Unicode >>encoding, any of: >> >> UTF-8 >> UTF-16 >> UTF-32 >> SCSU >> >>Of those, probably only SCSU requires a BOM, since Perl scripts are almost >>certain to be strict ASCII in the first few bytes where it matters. >> >>If it starts parsing as UTF-8, and runs into trouble, it might or might >>not try to intuit the real encoding. Haven't really decided that yet. >> >>You can always explicitly switch the encoding with "use encoding" or >>some such. > > > Is it too late in the Perl 6 process to ask for fewer options here? Ummm, why? Giving fewer options to users has never been a strong Perl tradition :-) Besides, recognizing the various Unicode encodings is pretty trivial, especially if we know something that's likely to be present in the first line, like "perl". > Saying "it's always UTF8, and if you want it different, you must > convert it yourself each time" would save lots and lots (and lots) of > problems with guessing. Predictability is good, yes? -- Jarkko Hietaniemi <[email protected]> http://www.iki.fi/jhi/ "There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'." -- Jack Cohen