From The RT System itself

I wouldn't call that dwimming. I'd call it being failsoft. I'd call
it preserving as much information as possible. But not dwimming. Most
people don't *mean* to get \x{deadbeef} in their error messages.

It's only dwimming if you count that people mean for their programs not
to blow up at odd times, and would usually rather get the information
out in a weird form than in no form at all.

: Most other usages of I/O are for consumption by other
: agents. And I know no other agents (except possibly some non-DOSISH
: filesystems) which will happily survive \x-mutiliated data.

Oh, come now, that's absurd. Most of them will survive just fine,
especially if they think they're reading HTML. Or log files. Or
email. Or almost any kind of flexibly formatted text. Which
admittedly doesn't encompass DOS filenames. Darn.

It's easy to fall into the habit of choosing rigor over vigor.
Certainly, rigor is a necessary evil in some situations. For those
situations we provide "use strict". But that's not the default in
Perl. We already have lots of computer languages with rigor, but not
so many with vigor.

But the Perl default must be to preserve information, to be failsoft,
and to try to make the best of a bad situation. If this makes other
computer programs look bad, well that's their problem. :-)

Larry

@iabyn - Status changed from 'stalled' to 'resolved'