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Postings from September 2009
I don't, unfortunately, have anything useful to say about Tom's post. But can someone explain to me why Perl forbids FFFE? I am guessing that it is from a misreading of the standard. This is one of the 66 "noncharacters" in the standard, defined thusly (http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.0.0/b1.pdf): Noncharacter. A code point that is permanently reserved for internal use and that should never be interchanged. Noncharacters consist of the values U+nFFFE and U+nFFFF (where n is from 0 to 10 base 16), and the values U+FDD0..U+FDEF. When it means internal use, it means in a given program it is fine to use, but it should not be written in data intended to be read by another program. Thus, a legitimate use for them would be in-band temporary markers since data should never contain them. But Perl doesn't let you. Is there some real reason for that, or did the implementors just think that they were illegal, period? There is an open bug asking that Perl allow them, dating from 2006 http://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=38293 Someone submitted a patch that did thatThread Previous | Thread Next