I don't think fuzzix was trying to divert the discussion onto Perl, but citing it as an example of a language generally agreed to do an excellent job of handlin

I don't think fuzzix was trying to divert the discussion onto Perl, but citing it as an example of a language generally agreed to do an excellent job of handling character encodings in which it still isn't true (as the article alleges for Tcl) that "encodings are not a problem - they just work". The purpose of the comment seems clear enough to me: to point out two claims made by the article that seem implausibly optimistic: 1. That i18n "just happens", which as fuzzix says is surely impossible unless Tcl includes magical machine translation facilities. 2. That "encodings are not a problem - they just work", which would require Tcl to tell by some ingenious means what encoding is used by any given file -- something that Perl, despite being exactly the sort of language that doesn't mind the kind of heuristic complexity it would take to do this well, and being generally acknowledged to do a good job of handling Unicode, punts on).