On Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 12:56:14AM -0700, Mark A. Biggar wrote: : Yes, the value 0xFFFF can be stored as either 3 byte UTF-8 string or a 2 : byte UCS-2 value, but the Unicode standard specifically says that the : values 0xFFFF, 0xFFFE and 0xFEFF are NOT valid codepoints and should : never appear in a Unicode string. 0xFFFF is reserved for out-of-band : signaling (such the -1 returnd by getc()) and 0xFFFE and 0xFEFF are : specificaly reserved for out-of-band marking a UCS-2 file as being : either bigendian or littlendian, but are specifically not considered : part of the data. chr() is currently defined to mean convert an int : value to a Unicode codepoint. That's why I said that chr(65535) should : return an exception, it's an argument error similar to sqrt(-1).
It has to at least be possible to Think Bad Thoughts in Perl. It doesn't have to be the default, though. But there has to be some way of allowing illegal characters to be talked about, or you can't write programs that talk about them. It's like saying it's okay to be an executioner as long as you don't kill anyone... Larry
