From: Joao Pedrosa <joaopedrosa@...>
Date: 2005-01-13T08:20:41+09:00
Subject: Re: The face of Unicode support in the future

Hi,

On Thu, 13 Jan 2005 08:05:27 +0900, Mathieu Bouchard <matju@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 7 Jan 2005, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> > |Do I need to submit a RCR for those, or should I go for two of them ?
> > I think a fixnum is not enough since a character may not be
> > represented by a single codepoint, e.g. character composition, or
> > surrogation. Besides that, a character is represented by combination
> > of codepoint(s) and
> 
> questions:
> 
> 1. are those features of unicode ?
> 
> 2. are those required for a support of Japanese that make sense ?
> 
> Those are not rhetorical questions. I don't have the answers nor the
> background to attempt tackling them. I didn't know that those features
> were important to you, and I barely ever hear about them.
> 
> Character composition, as I know it, is a hack to make accented letters,
> underlining, bold, and such, by interleaving the special code 8
> (backspace) between characters to be composed, destined to be used with
> daisy printers and TTY's, and already became dated when TTY's got replaced
> by CRT monitors during the 1970's. It stemmed from previous usual practice
> in trying to type French on an American typewriter (and other similar
> situations in other countries)
> 
> ISO-Latin-1 (that I normally use) contains all the self-contained
> codepoints necessary to write in many European languages, and as such, you
> never need composition in those languages with that charset, and as far as
> I can tell, all other charsets are designed with that in mind, including
> unicode. So it is difficult for me to believe composition is required.
> 
> Is this because of the way Japanese works? (then if it's so specific to
> Japanese, why hasn't Ruby gotten that feature a decade ago ?? I'm _really_
> puzzled)

Matz has talked about this in the past. comp.lang.ruby should have
something archived, for example.

The problem is split:
1) How to support new encodings.
2) How to maintain backward compatibility.

So, Matz worries about those two. Many of us worry only with "1". The
reason is that Japanese, Chinese, and other languages need some
backward compatibility with what has been written in these languages.

Cheers,
Joao