Re: BOM and principle of least surprise

Erland Sommarskog <[email protected]> writes:
>Jarkko Hietaniemi ([email protected]) writes:
>> Nick Ing-Simmons wrote:
>>> This thread started as complaint that perl5 can't read a 
>>> script saved as UCS-2/UTF-16 or whatever Windows uses.
>> 
>> Uh, really?  Perl 5.8+ should be able to do that, automatically.
>
>To be able to that, it would have have to understand byte-order marks (which 
>it doesn't). I think there was a suggestion that you could specify an
>option on the command-line to specify the encoding of the script file,
>but I haven't tried. 
> 
>> I thought the issue was about Perl not automatically guessing the
>> UTF-16 encoding of input data.
>
>Both input data and the script. Just because the script has been saved
>in UTF-8, does not mean that literals in the script are taken as UTF-8.

I disagree there. The literals have to be in same encoding as 
the surounding script - anything else is madness.