From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2005-11-19T15:59:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Investigating Ruby - key limitations ?

Hi,

In message "Re: Investigating Ruby - key limitations ?"
    on Sat, 19 Nov 2005 01:47:18 +0900, markjreed@gmail.com writes:

|> This is, in fact, far  *superior* to what Java and Python do -- which are limited to UTF-8
|> string representations (AFAIK).
|
|Not true of Java or Python.  Or Perl, for that matter; I don't know if
|the Perl5 interpreter will read source code in anything other than
|ASCII/Latin-1/UTF-8, but a Perl program can certainly read and write
|strings in just about any encoding you can think of via the "use
|encoding" pragma.  Including Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, Big5, or anything else
|.. . . while the interface presented to the Perl programmer always uses
|Unicode.

As far as I know, physical string representation in Perl/Python/Java
is only UTF (8 or 16). As you've stated, they can read/write strings
in any encoding but they are converted to/from Unicode at the surface.
Correct me if I'm wrong.

							matz.