[ruby-talk:12175] Re: SV: Re: Is Ruby japanese-centered?

In article <[e-mail]>,
Henning VON ROSEN <[e-mail]> wrote:
>The current string module in Ruby is not just "inspired by western culture",
>but many of the functions are supporting *english only*. Just adding on is
>not good enough. As long as we go for *english only* as a model for i18n, we
>can freely mix issues of *encoding*, *string*handling and *language
>specific* support/methods.
>
>Someway I think I would prefer a separation of encoding, strings, and
>language issues. The merged version now to be found in any computer language
>is just making the i18n theme much less transparent than it actually is.

It's always been the case that when programming in english, one doesn't
have to worry oneself over character encodings and such.  It should
be just as transparent for other languages.  The approach suggested
for Python in one of the messages you describe is a good start,
though I don't think a rigid "no default character set!" rule seems
a bit counterproductive.  Defaulting to UTF-8 should be fine for most
applications and shouldn't break most properly-written scripts.  Besides,
would open() still take three arguments when the second one is 'rb'?

The Ruby way would probably be similar, with a focus on transparency.
There'd probably be another $-variable that describes the encoding of
$< and $>, which would default in some intelligent ways based on the
operating system.  There would also have to be a way to tell what encoding
the script itself is using; the #!ruby line might be useful for that.

>The fact that Ruby is widely used for non-english, non-western-lingual
>language processing might be beneficial. But when will I be able to read all
>these Nihon-go docs?

string1.romanize!

>BTW I heard that Klingon is to make it to the UC Standard:-)

They're just doing that to see if they can convince some small island
nations that Klingons really exist.  :)

-- 
Nick Bensema <[e-mail]>      ICQ#2135445 
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