Fabulous contribution. Thanks!

Regarding "every script file is converted to UTF-8 format" -- I am thinking that conversion of the text of Perl scripts from ISO-8859-1 isn't necessary in order to work with Unicode characters in the other ways you've described, unless one wants to be able to directly "type" a Unicode character into the script, e.g.

my $default_name = 'Ǣsop';

Do you agree?