On Sun, Nov 03, 2002 at 09:41:44AM -0000, Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote:
> Matthew Zimmerman wrote in perl.perl6.language :
> >
> > So let me make my original question a little more
> > general: are Perl 6 source files encoded in Latin-1,
> > UTF-8, or will Perl 6 provide some sort of translation
> > mechanism, like specifying the charset on the command
> > line?
>
> I expect probably something similar to Perl 5's encoding
> pragma. (But hopefully lexically scoped.)
Okay, but what will the default be? UTF-8? iso-8859-1? My
current locale? Am I going to have put
use encoding 'utf8'; # or whatever the P6 syntax will be
at the beginning of every program that might get distributed
outside of my home country to make sure it'll run? Are we
going to tell newbies to make sure they have '-w' and 'use
strict' *and* 'use encoding' at the beginning of their programs?
I'm just worried about the possibility of writing Perl 6
programs and then sending them to friends in other parts
of the world and having them fail in subtle ways because
my Perl 6 expects 0xAB and theirs expects 0xC2AB (or visa
versa). Or if I post a code sample to CLPM that runs on
my machine that doesn't compile from the posting because
my news client automatically converts charsets.
Undoubtedly the Perl 6 parser will be smart enough to
figure out all of this, and I'm making a mountain out of a
molehill. But I just want to make sure that one of the
people in authority here either is or will be thinking
about this.
--
Matt
Matthew Zimmerman
Interdisciplinary Biophysics, University of Virginia
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~mdz4c/
