From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2008-09-18T14:23:24+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:18695] Re: Character encodings - a radical suggestion

Hi,

In message "Re: [ruby-core:18678] Re: Character encodings - a radical suggestion"
    on Thu, 18 Sep 2008 02:17:32 +0900, Tim Bray <Tim.Bray@Sun.COM> writes:

|Also, Mojikyo is much larger than Unicode.

Indeed.  I've heard some people used prototype of M17N Ruby to process
Mojikyo text.  Since Mojikyo character set is not compatible with
Unicode, it was their only way to process Mojikyo text using scripting
language.  That is one my primary motivation over the current M17N
design, although 1.9.1 does not support Mojikyo encoding yet.

							matz.

|So, there are two reasonable goals:
|1. Provide useful features for strings and characters in the general  
|case, including non-Unicode data
|2. Provide good support for Unicode
|
|The problem is that the people who care about #1 and don't care about  
|#2 very much, and vice versa.  The people who spend all their time  
|doing Web/Internet stuff mostly only care about #2.  It seems that  
|Unicode is important so Ruby should have some special low-level  
|language facilities, especially for efficient access to codepoints.   
|If we can do that without harming #1, then everyone should be happy.

We have just started to care about #2 lately, since we are about to
finish #1.  

							matz.