David: when do you find that knowledge of Perl’s internal encoding (Devel::Peek, UTF8 flag) is useful?
I’ve come to think that these are never, in fact, useful unless you’re doing something wrong already. Even for XS, I can’t think of a case where that’s needed.
If the code I'm working on has got confused and I need to patch it to unconfuse matters, then checking exactly what is in the variable is, I find, the quickest way to figure out what needs doing.
This article refers folks to Perl internals but doesn’t describe when it is (and isn’t) useful to look at them. In a lot of cases it’s a red herring that can reinforce incorrect mental models about how all of this works.
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David: when do you find that knowledge of Perl’s internal encoding (Devel::Peek, UTF8 flag) is useful?
I’ve come to think that these are never, in fact, useful unless you’re doing something wrong already. Even for XS, I can’t think of a case where that’s needed.
If the code I'm working on has got confused and I need to patch it to unconfuse matters, then checking exactly what is in the variable is, I find, the quickest way to figure out what needs doing.
How do the Perl internals make a difference, though? Is this some area where the abstraction leaks?
Thus far, my perception is that the only areas where string internals leak are:
Are there more places than those?
Looking at the internals is the easiest way to understand what state someone else has managed to get the data into.
I’m still wondering why it would matter whether someone got the data into internal-UTF8 or internal-bytes. Are you unable to use unicode_strings?
unicode_stringswon't help when the problem is "printdoes weird stuff" because the data is already broken by the time my code gets it.But
printdoesn’t care what the string internals are …This article refers folks to Perl internals but doesn’t describe when it is (and isn’t) useful to look at them. In a lot of cases it’s a red herring that can reinforce incorrect mental models about how all of this works.