From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2008-12-18T16:07:56+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:20630] Re: 1.9 character encoding (was: encoding of symbols)

Hi,

In message "Re: [ruby-core:20619] Re: 1.9 character encoding (was: encoding of symbols)"
    on Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:43:45 +0900, danielcavanagh@aanet.com.au writes:

|> Is there any alternative choice that makes sense?
|
|i think there is an alternative :) in fact, i think it should be the only
|option: doing it by character, not byte. if we have a string ("cat" for
|example) in two different, incompatible encodings (say latin-1 and ucs4),
|they *should* match because they are the *same* thing: "cat" and "cat"
|
|why should we care how the characters are represented in the computer?
|there is already too much trouble caused by all the different encodings in
|the world. the encodings should disappear from view and we should only see
|the characters, unless we explicitly ask for the byte values

I am against trancoding before comparison.  The applications models
falls into either:

  * treat single encoding only, say iso-8869-1 (single encoding model)
  * convert everything Unicode at I/O (universal encoding model)
  * mix various encoding per strings (multiple encoding model)

Most of the applications use the former two, and mix encoding
comparison happens only in the last one.  So I don't think we need to
make comparison more complex than it is now.

							matz.