Why does modern Perl avoid UTF-8 by default?

Question

I wonder why most modern solutions built using Perl don\'t enable UTF-8 by default.

I understand there are many legacy problems for core Perl scripts, where it may b

Answer 1

There's a truly horrifying amount of ancient code out there in the wild, much of it in the form of common CPAN modules. I've found I have to be fairly careful enabling Unicode if I use external modules that might be affected by it, and am still trying to identify and fix some Unicode-related failures in several Perl scripts I use regularly (in particular, iTiVo fails badly on anything that's not 7-bit ASCII due to transcoding issues).