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Postings from July 2021
> On Jul 30, 2021, at 2:27 PM, Leon Timmermans <fawaka@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Fri, Jul 30, 2021 at 7:56 PM Felipe Gasper <felipe@felipegasper.com> wrote: > > > > On Jul 30, 2021, at 1:48 PM, Leon Timmermans <fawaka@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > On Fri, Jul 30, 2021 at 6:56 PM Felipe Gasper <felipe@felipegasper.com> wrote: > > FWIW, I think this will regress Perl’s usability. > > > > Probably the worst part about character encoding in Perl is that nothing indicates when you’ve over-encoded or under-encoded. But, at the very least everything right now is consistent by default: source code is parsed as bytes (“Latin-1”), and I/O happens as bytes. Thus, a “minimal-effort” approach to writing Perl will at least minimize the odds of encoding mismatches: you only run into trouble if you explicitly decode/encode. > > > > If `use v5.36` is to disrupt that consistency by making source code UTF-8-decoded but *leaving* I/O as bytes, this seems likely to add another “shin-bumper” to use of Perl that doesn’t happen in languages that type byte strings differently from text strings. > > > > So quick-and-simple things like `print "é"` will now, in “modern” Perl, break, with no indication of where/why until a human being comes along, notices the problem, and puts in the time to debug it. > > > > It doesn't actually break. PerlIO will try to downgrade that for a non-:utf8 handle, or upgrade for a :utf8 handle. > > It’ll downgrade it, but it won’t encode it, so you’ll get mojibake: > > > perl -Mutf8 -e'print "é"' > � > > It will print mojibake as well if the script is latin-1 encoded. It's mojibake because the terminal is utf-8, but the IO handle is latin1. FWIW I think it’s easier to think of the default I/O mode as “bytes” or “native” 8-bit encoding” rather than “Latin-1”. In that light it’s easier to see the status quo as the more reasonable default: we parse the code as bytes, and we print as bytes. Changing it so that the (“modern”) default is to decode strings as UTF-8 but still output them as bytes seems likely to introduce lots of confusion, which will either a) discourage adoption of “use v5.36”, or b) discourage use of Perl at all: Anti-Perler: Hey that new Perl script you wrote mangles our CEO’s name. Perler: That’s weird … I used the modern defaults … wonder where the bug is … Anti-Perler: Maybe you should just switch to $otherlang, where this stuff doesn’t happen. -FThread Previous | Thread Next