That is a fair point, but I'm not trying argue that Perl is somehow better. I am just using it as a reference point. I'm more suggesting the article may be overstating the ease-of-use / capabilities of Tcl.

To be clear, I'm not arguing against using Tcl in favour of Perl or anything else. It's just that my experience with a language with great encoding support doesn't jive with what's claimed here.