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Postings from September 2009
On approximately 9/1/2009 10:53 AM, came the following characters from
the keyboard of karl williamson:
> During the hiatus of this thread, I received a personal email I found
> persuasive from Jarkko. Here is the relevant portion:
>
> > My opinion would be that if Unicode has a definition "X" or "Xyz", Perl
> > should implement that with an identical name \p{X} or \p{Xyz}. In
> other
> > words, Unicode wins. In other words, Perl's definitions should be
> equal
> > to Unicode's. The Perl definitions like "cntrl" (which ultimately came
> > from the POSIX named character classes, [[:cntrl:]] were not
> necessarily
> > fully thought through, and it's admissible to break them. Unicode
> knows
> > better than Perl.
>
> So, I propose to essentially follow his advice.
Unicode is hard enough for people to understand, and manipulate, without
having Perl do things that aren't defined by Unicode. So I agree with
persuasive Jarrko's advice.
While there is room for Perl to have extended features, I would not
encourage them unless a compelling need for them is found in real
applications.
Clearly, Perl should retain as many past features as is reasonably
possible for compatibility's sake, but not to the point of conflicting
with syntax that is provided for Unicode standard features. If there
would be serious conflicts here, I'd rather see a whole new "Unicode
compatible" set of character classes defined, so that people could
completely avoid potential conflicts and confusion.
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