Yes and Perl’s Unicode transition between 5.5 and 5.6* was exemplary. There were some speed bumps but generally old stuff continued to work and Unicode support

Yes and Perl’s Unicode transition between 5.5 and 5.6* was exemplary. There were some speed bumps but generally old stuff continued to work and Unicode support could be added in a straightforward manner. In contrast to how python 3 handled it (not trying to start a language war, these days I prefer python overall). I suspect Larry Wall just understood text processing much more deeply than Guido (makes sense since he is a linguist and Perl was always more text oriented). *technically it was 5.005 or something to 5.6 because they decided to drop a zero or two