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Postings from August 2010
A user can define ToUpper() to override the default uppercasing, and similar functions for lower- and titlecasing. It's always been known that this works only on utf8-encoded strings, and that it violates scoping rules, but I've been doing some experiments and discovered things that were surprises to me anyway, and contradict what I had previously patched perlunicode.pod to say, based on my more limited understanding. I'm working on a patch that describes the current scoping issues, which look real ugly to me. Here's what I've written as of now: "This mechanism is not well behaved as far as affecting other packages and scopes. All programs have exactly one uppercasing behavior, one lowercasing behavior, and one titlecasing behavior in effect for utf8-encoded strings for the duration of the program. Each of these behaviors is irrevocably determined the first time the corresponding function is called to change a utf8-encoded string's case. If a corresponding C<To-> function has been defined in the package making that first call, the mapping defined by that function will be the mapping used for the duration of the program's execution across all packages and scopes. If no corresponding C<To-> function has been defined in that package, the standard official mapping will be used for all packages and scopes, ignoring any corresponding C<To-> function anywhere." So what would a sane behavior look like that didn't break backwards compatibility too much?Thread Next