James will present how the Open Source Perl programming language has made great improvements in its internationalization support by adopting Unicode as the internal encoding. The paper will present a comprehensive discussion of locale management, character set conversion, message catalogs, and form validation using the Perl language and available modules. Also, he will talk about the picu project, which is a Perl wrapper around the ICU (International Classes for Unicode.) Finally, he will show how programmers can take advantage of these new features in their own Perl development projects.