Re: The face of Unicode support in the future

Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:

> Hi,

Moin.

> |(And I think it would somehow need to work for all possible script 
> |encodings, but I'm not sure if this is possible when all string literals 
> |automatically use the script encoding. This might be a problem.)
> 
> We might need something to denote raw strings (r"" for example).

Hm, I thought about that, but I'm not so sure. E.g. what about %{} style 
literals and so on? While this might be a special case of string 
suffixes, there still could be another and simpler way of doing it. Hm.

I wonder, what format would external Strings be in? (E.g. ones that get 
read via IO or Sockets.) They can not be in the script's encoding in all 
cases because the encodings might not be compatible. If they would 
always use the raw encoding we might be able to get away with not having 
raw strings. I'm not sure if non-script-encoding String literals would 
ever be needed outside of encoding libraries. And those could use 
number.chr(encoding) anyway.

> |Does this mean that #size and #length would do different things or am I 
> |just misunderstanding?
> 
> In the current prototype, it work differently (length gives number of
> code points in the string; size give the length of the byte sequence).
> But I now think they should behave same.

Ah, I agree. I think it would be odd to have things that were synonyms 
so long do different things. Plus getting the byte sequence length could 
still be done with .raw_length or something similar.

> |Hm, what about international method and variable names? (These are 
> |possible with -Ku right now.)
> 
> In this case, we give up those.

In case they're not given up: Would Ruby know about upper and lower case 
in international characters? (E.g. could I have a class named 
底testeKlasse?) And I wonder if it would make sense to provide ways for 
distinguishing class and variable names in cases where there is no case 
differences. (So Japanese names might for example be prefixed with 
special symbols / particles.)

Sorry if this last area is not so important, but I think it is an 
interesting area of thought.

And thanks again for answering in so much detail.