15 Nov
1999
15 Nov
'99
11:44 p.m.
[Tim, wonders why Perl and Tcl went w/ UTF-8 internally] [Greg Stein]
Probably for the exact reason that you stated in your messages: many 8-bit (7-bit?) functions continue to work quite well when given a UTF-8-encoded string. i.e. they didn't have to rewrite the entire Perl/TCL interpreter to deal with a new string type.
I'd guess it is a helluva lot easier for us to add a Python Type than for Perl or TCL to whack around with new string types (since they use strings so heavily).
Sounds convincing to me! Bumped into an old thread on c.l.p.m. that suggested Perl was also worried about UCS-2's 64K code point limit. But I'm already on record as predicting we'll regret any decision <wink>.