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

You should enable the unicode strings feature, and this is the default if you use v5.14;

You should not really use unicode identifiers esp. for foreign code via utf8 as they are insecure in perl5, only cperl got that right. See e.g. http://perl11.org/blog/unicode-identifiers.html

Regarding utf8 for your filehandles/streams: You need decide by yourself the encoding of your external data. A library cannot know that, and since not even libc supports utf8, proper utf8 data is rare. There's more wtf8, the windows aberration of utf8 around.

BTW: Moose is not really "Modern Perl", they just hijacked the name. Moose is perfect Larry Wall-style postmodern perl mixed with Bjarne Stroustrup-style everything goes, with an eclectic aberration of proper perl6 syntax, e.g. using strings for variable names, horrible fields syntax, and a very immature naive implementation which is 10x slower than a proper implementation. cperl and perl6 are the true modern perls, where form follows function, and the implementation is reduced and optimized.