From: Shot - Piotr Szotkowski <shot@...>
Date: 2006-01-14T01:37:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby, Unicode - ever?

Hello.

Austin Ziegler:

> On 13/01/06, Shot - Piotr Szotkowski <shot@shot.pl> wrote:

>> Do what other languages do, ask the underlying operating
>> system for LC_COLLATE (or ask it to sort the data by itself).

> Which is not really appropriate for all operating
> systems, and is one of the *dumbest* things about POSIX.

I'm not a language developer, but a programmer (doing a lot of i18n and
l10n work lately) and user, and to me using LC_COLLATE when available
seems much better than defaulting to binary collation 'just because'.
BTW: PostgreSQL defaults to system's LC_COLLATE if not told explicitely
on cluster init as well.

>> No, Ruby could implement a counterpart of MySQL's
>> utf8_general_ci and/or utf8_unicode_ci collations:
>> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/charset-unicode-sets.html

> Given how much else MySQL gets wrong, why should
> this be trusted to be anything close to right?

Have you actually followed the link? Quoting: The utf8_unicode_ci
collation is implemented according to the Unicode Collation
Algorithm (UCA) described at http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/
The collation uses the version-4.0.0 UCA weight keys:
http://www.unicode.org/Public/UCA/4.0.0/allkeys-4.0.0.txt

I won't start discussing MySQL's quality[1], but I don't see a reason
why Unicode's own collation algorithm shouldn't at least be considered.

[1] Question of the Week: Who in their right mind documents 'CREATE
    USER' in a shell for version 4.1, but does not actually introduce
    the command until 5.0?

Cheers,
-- Shot
-- 
             To a database person, every nail looks like a thumb.
             Or something like that.            -- Jamie Zawinski
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