> Perl came from ASCII-centric roots, so it's likely that most of our
> biases are ASCII-centric. And for a couple of reasons, it's going to
> be hard to deal with that:
>
> 1. Backwards compatability with existing Perl practice,
>
> and
>
> 2. To do language-neutral right is -really- hard; look at locales and
> Unicode as examples.
>
> As such, instead of trying to make Perl work for all languages out of
> the box, why not make Perl's language handling extensible from within
> the language and have it be as language-free as possible (except for
> backwards compatability stuff) out of the box.
Right on.
> Examples of what we can do:
>
> I. Make ranges work on Unicode code-points (if they don't already).
Urrrr, yes, they do, if you by code-point ranges mean \x{...}-\x{...}
but in general I would like to discourage the use of ranges. What do
you think [a-\N{KATAKANA LETTER KI}] should mean? I think it should
mean a compile time error. People misuse ranges for classes. Ranges
also imply some collation, which is, as discussed, really bad.
--
$jhi++; # http://www.iki.fi/jhi/
# There is this special biologist word we use for 'stable'.
# It is 'dead'. -- Jack Cohen
