At the risk of re-enforcing my apparent optimism. On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 04:02:10PM -0700, Darren Duncan wrote:
> that the next best one to exploit is ยค (euro; > unicode=20AC; utf8=E282AC), and the next best is Woah. You've just demonstrated why Euro is far worse than any of the other "Unicode" characters so far suggested. You mail headers say: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" ; format="flowed" The symbol in your message *as sent* is the international currency symbol, U00A4. The Euro symbol is not part of ISO-8859-1. (ISO-8859-15 yes, but that's about 10 years more recent) ISO-8859-1 has been the default standard for the character set on most Internet protocols for a long time, and many systems for the past 10+ years have supported it by default (most Unix variants, Windows 3.1, I think. DOS boxes were CP437, but native Windows was (extended) ISO-8859-1) This cannot be said for ISO-8859-15. So I can see little reason why any currently operational system will be incapable of displaying the ISO-8859-1 operators in scripts or CPAN modules correctly, even if the editor the maintenance programmer (or sysdamin) is constrained to entering the ASCII digraphs. But there will be a lot of systems out there where this is not true for the Euro symbol, and the assumption of ISO-8859-1 defaults will mean that this won't be the last time that Euro symbols are going to get mangled during transit, with all the ensuing pain, frustration, losses and defections to other languages that this will cause. Perl 5 runs everywhere: http://www.cpan.org/ports/index.html Perl 6 is intended to be an improvement on Perl 5. It would be a shame to design in restrictions on portability. Nicholas Clark
