Front page | perl.perl5.porters |
Postings from February 2000
Having finally gotten around to reading perllocale, I find this
welcome feature:
[...] if the C<$^U> global flag is set to C<1>, nearly all
operations will use character semantics by default.
But I also find this *unwelcome* feature:
As an added convenience, if the C<utf8> pragma is used in the
C<main> package, C<$^U> is enabled automatically.
I consider this behavior less a convenience and more a bug. I think
it's a bad idea to give one pragma both lexical effects and global
effects. Please separate them.
Consider: In a main program (which could be quite large, after all),
there could easily be a need to C<use utf8> in an inner block just for
some small purpose, e.g. turning on a Unicode RE feature. Yet if I
read the docs correctly, that single pragma use changes the behavior
of the whole program! And the only way around that weirdness --
assuming you notice it in time -- is to temporarily change the current
package in that inner block. Yuck.
[XXX: Should there be a -C switch to enable $^U?]
Absolutely. And then the intent of the global behavior of C<use utf8>
can be met by putting "-C" on the shebang line.
--
Chip Salzenberg - a.k.a. - <chip@valinux.com>
"He's Mr. Big of 'Big And Tall' fame." // MST3K
Thread Previous
|
Thread Next