On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 03:15:41PM -0800, Brad Hughes wrote:
> Simon Cozens wrote:
> [...]
> > I'm just not sure it's fair on Old World hackers. Will there be a way to stop
> > Perl upgrading stuff to Unicode on the way in?
>
> ....and I'm probably not the only Old World hacker that would
> prefer a build option to simply eliminate Unicode support altogether...
Eh, no, read it again. (I had to.) It won't interfere with Old World hackers
at all. Data coming in won't be implicitly converted to Unicode, so programs
under Perl 6 should see legacy data the same way as they do under 5.6.0; if
you pretend that Unicode isn't there, it won't bother you.
For instance, chr() will produce Unicode codepoints. But you can pretend that
they're ASCII codepoints, it's only the EBCDIC folk that'll get hurt. I hope
and suspect there'll be an equivalent of "use bytes" which makes chr(256)
either blow up or wrap around.
So we're not exactly forcing Unicode down people's throats. (Damn.)
--
"Even more amazing was the realization that God has Internet access. I
wonder if He has a full newsfeed?"
(By Matt Welsh)
