Re^2: Jargon relating to Perl strings

[JavaFan]

As you see, I’ve completely dodged the whole UTF8-flag thing. By giving definititions of string components for just code points alone (and graphemes built up of code points) as the fundamental contituent string components, not about bytes and characters, I (try to) avoid the thornier issues.

And by avoiding the UTF-8 flag/encoding, you're creating confusion. $x = "\xBB"; utf8::upgrade($x);. Now it's not clear to me whether you consider $x to by a byte or not. One can encode 0xBB in 8 bits (and it is encoded in 8 bits in LATIN-1), but its Unicode encoding uses 16. So, if you say A code point that fits within 8 bits is sometimes called a byte, that's ambiguous. Whether or not the code point 0xBB fits in 8 bits depends on its encoding.