From: Vincent Isambart <vincent.isambart@...>
Date: 2008-02-11T15:51:29+09:00
Subject: Re: very bad character performance on ruby1.9


> I would not limit it to ASCII characters but would directly go for  
> Unicode. As the Unicode universe requires at most 21 bits for  
> addressing any code point, we could easily make a separate class and  
> immediate 4-bit lead specifier for it, f.e. 0xE, like 0xC is for  
> object pointers, to fit any 32 bit integer.

Unicode is only one encoding among many. Contrary to other languages  
like Python, Ruby chose not to manage all strings in Unicode, but in  
their original encoding. Unicode is only slightly privileged (with for  
example the \u notation). It would be strange to have other encodings  
be managed differently...