Re: What "Unicode support" really means

On 06/03/2014 07:56, Crypto Compress wrote:

And a second Q: Would "type juggling" allow for autoboxing into a second string type where needed (unicode-aware functions)?

Perl 5 does this, a bit, but the problem is you need to know the *current* encoding of the string *before* the conversion anyway, and if it turns out to have been mis-labelled, you'll get "invalid encoding" errors at unpredictable points in your program. If the user has to say "this string of bytes represents UTF-8, make a Unicode string out of it", it's at least obvious that that's where conversion will happen. Granted, we don't want the user having to write that for every single $_GET variable, though... -- Rowan Collins [IMSoP]