Re: The face of Unicode support in the future

On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 11:53:48PM +0900, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> The "right" definition of characters differs application to
> application.  That's the reason I don't add a Character class.  I want
> to leave it to the user.

I don't understand what you mean here.  How is having "abc"[0] return a
String a better solution than having "abc"[0] return a Character?  Is it
less restrictive in some way?

Anyway, some questions:

1. Will this be true?

  ?a == "a"

It would allow code like this to be forward-compatible:

  line = gets
  if line[0] == ?A then
    ...
  end

2. What will the encoding be of the character following the ? mark?  Can
   I write:

  if line[0] == ?<some utf-8 character> then

or must I use a String instead?

3. Can I compare two strings that have two different encodings?

4. Will $KCODE change to allow more encodings or will it be going away?

5. Can there be user-defined encodings (e.g. if some user wants to
   provide utf-16)?

6. Should String#encoding return a String or a Symbol?

Paul