Ivan Kurmanov pointed out that the whole "use utf8"

semantics change was missing from Incompatible Changes.
Ooops.	(Also tweaked the announcement.)

p4raw-id: //depot/perl@17596

diff --git a/pod/perldelta.pod b/pod/perldelta.pod
index 305dd20..5e29c34 100644 (file)
--- a/pod/perldelta.pod
+++ b/pod/perldelta.pod
@@ -118,6 +118,20 @@ point format on OpenVMS Alpha, potentially breaking binary compatibility
 with external libraries or existing data.  G_FLOAT is still available as
 a configuration option.  The default on VAX (D_FLOAT) has not changed.
 
+=head2 New Unicode Semantics (no more C<use utf8>)
+
+Previously in Perl 5.6 to use Unicode one would say "use utf8" and
+then the operations (like string concatenation) were Unicode-aware
+in that lexical scope.
+
+This was found to be an inconvenient interface, and in Perl 5.8 the
+Unicode model has completely changed: now the "Unicodeness" is bound
+to the data itself, and for most of the time "use utf8" is not needed
+at all.  The only remaining use of "use utf8" is when the Perl script
+itself has been written in the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode.
+
+See L<perluniintro> for the explanation of the current model. 
+
 =head2 New Unicode Properties
 
 Unicode I<scripts> are now supported. Scripts are similar to (and superior