[sisyphus] Fwd: regarding the reopened can of Unicode worms

[Alexey Tourbin]

Поддержка юникода в перле.
Продолжение есть в архиве.

----- Forwarded message from Jarkko Hietaniemi -----

Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2004 00:57:08 +0200
From: Jarkko Hietaniemi
Subject: regarding the reopened can of Unicode worms
To: perl5-porters
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5 (Macintosh/20040208)

At the request of many people I took a quick peek at the raging discussion.

My comments are as follows.

There is no way to get "it all work".  There was no way to "get it all 
work".  "All" is a big word.

One has to consider backward compatibility (ASCII, "binary", locales)
and all the various aspects of Unicode.  The best guiding light I can 
give is to always think of I/O (the Perl scripts being a form of I): how 
did this data get in, what data do we think it is, and how is the data 
going to go out?

A good example of unexpected breakage was the 5.8.0 semantics of locales 
possibly turning on UTF-8-ness on STD* streams: a good idea, but the 
result was horrible breakage in Redhat systems because they did have 
UTF-8 locales for everybody, and their print chr(0xff) started producing 
two bytes, not one.

After some careful thought and consideration I must say I can't help 
taking it somewhat personally that people are now coming out of the 
woodwork and finding things "wrong".  I have lately been accused both 
privately and publicly, both directly and indirectly, both for keeping 
backward compatibility and for not keeping it.

I know what we have has problems, but I am done with it.  You can do 
whatever you want, change the Unicode semantics and interfaces however 
you want.  I gave it my best shot.

P.S. Sorry about the format=flawed in the message headers.  I've had a 
bad email week, on both MUA and MTA fronts.

-- 
Jarkko Hietaniemi http://www.iki.fi/jhi/ "There is this special
biologist word we use for 'stable'.  It is 'dead'." -- Jack Cohen

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