Re: BOM and principle of least surprise

> 
>>Using a thing like utf8 to determine the encoding of character literals
>>is not a good idea. Suddenly someone saves the file in a different 
>>encoding, and guess what happens. And as long as Perl does not act
>>on byte-order marks, how would it be able to read a script that has
>>been saved in UTF16-LE, which is the normal way of saving Unicode data
>>on Windows?
> 
> 
> I haven't tried this myself...

I just now tried and it seems that it's not as trivial as I thought...

We do have a test for UTF-16 detection in scripts, but the test seems to
be rather limited -- my simple first test of writing out a script in
UTF-16LE and then trying to run it with Perl didn't work :-(

> 
>>I thought the issue was about Perl not automatically guessing the
>>UTF-16 encoding of input data.
> 
> 
> That is a related but separate issue.
>