Why don't scripting languages output Unicode to the Windows console?

Question

The Windows console has been Unicode aware for at least a decade and perhaps as far back as Windows NT. However for some reason the major cross-platform scripting languages

Answer 1

Small contribution to the discussion - I am running Czech localized Windows XP, which almost everywhere uses CP1250 code page. Funny thing with console is though that it still uses legacy DOS 852 code page.

I was able to make very simple perl script that prints utf8 encoded data to console using:

binmode STDOUT, ":utf8:encoding(cp852)";

Tried various options (including utf16le), but only above settings printed accented Czech characters correctly.

Edit: I played a little more with the problem and found Win32::Unicode. The module exports function printW that works properly both in output and redirected:

use utf8;
use Win32::Unicode;

binmode STDOUT, ":utf8";
printW "Příliš žluťoučký kůň úpěl ďábelské ódy";