Re: BOM and principle of least surprise

At 8:56 AM +0300 5/5/04, Jarkko Hietaniemi wrote:
>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".

My mistake. When I saw "script" in the first line, I assumed we were 
talking about subsections of Unicode, not "script as in a program". 
You're right about doing a guess based on looking for "perl" being 
pretty definitive.

My hope for fewer options is for reading input. That is, I'd like the 
default encoding for all inputs and outputs to be UTF8, unless it has 
been converted and that conversion is somehow flagged.