From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2001-06-25T16:41:54+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:16844] Re: national characters is strings

Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:16843] Re: national characters is strings"
    on 01/06/25, "Aleksei Guzev" <aleksei.guzev@bigfoot.com> writes:

|That's good enough. But I'm afraid this could ( not would ) cause string
|operations to slow down. I'm not an expirienced Linux etc programer...

Ruby already has the ability to handle multibyte character string
(mostly Japanese), and we use it everyday.  "we" here means everyone
using Ruby.  We don't meet any serious performance problem yet.  Do
you?

|Is it a problem to use Unicode?

Well, yes and no.  Unicode is a very pragmatic solution works for most
of the cases.  So I want to support Unicode on Ruby M17N.  But there
IS problem domain where Unicode doesn't work.  I want to help them too.

Plus, for some languages (e.g. Japanese), conversion cost to/from
Unicode can be burden.  If you can handle them without any conversion,
it's better.

|My yesterday effort was in adding three pairs of instance methods to
|String: dos2koi8!, win2koi8!, win2dos! ( with their "non_bangs" ). Those
|methods simply convert their recievers. Those were written in Intel's
|Pentium Assembler (because of my preferences :)))

Since I have no knowledge about koi8, I need help.  But I have no
knowledge about Pentium Assembler either. ;-<


							matz.