From: Martin Duerst <duerst@...>
Date: 2008-09-16T19:38:01+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:18625] Re: Ruby 1.9 strings & character encoding

[Sorry for being so late in answering. Among else, I was
attending the 32nd Internationalization and Unicode
Conference last week.]

At 02:43 08/09/09, NARUSE, Yui wrote:

>Moreover in other than Unicode, codepoint is not a important component.
>In EUC-JP or Shift_JIS, they are only an identifier of characters:
>"\xA2\xA4" is codepoint 0xA2A4 ... are they useful?

Not really. But the fact that they aren't useful in EUC-JP or
Shift_JIS doesn't mean that they aren't useful in Unicode.

And while in general, it's not a good idea to introduce something
'special' just for one encoding, that's totally different if
that encoding is e.g. US-ASCII or one (or all, in this case)
of the frequently-used Unicode encodings.


>Another reason is, GB18030 has characters consisted from 4 bytes.
>They may 32bit width, but Fixnum is 31bit in 32bit environment.
>
>So we don't want to debuet codepoints on the main stage.

#ord already exposes them. What would be new with #each_code[point]?

Regards,    Martin.



#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp