From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2006-06-17T23:24:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?

On 6/17/06, Julian 'Julik' Tarkhanov <listbox@julik.nl> wrote:
> On 17-jun-2006, at 15:52, Austin Ziegler wrote:
>>> 8. Because Strings are tightly integrated into the language with the
>>> source reader and are used pervasively, much of this cannot be
>>> provided by add-on libraries, even with open classes. Therefore the
>>> need to have it in Ruby's canonical String class. This will break
>>> some old uses of String, but now is the right time for that.
>> "Now" isn't; Ruby 2.0 is. Maybe Ruby 1.9.1.
> Most probably wise, but I need casefolding and character classes to
> work since yesteryear. Oniguruma is there but even if you complie with
> it (which is not the default, still) you don't get char classes
> (AFAIK) and you don't get casefolding. Case-insensitive search/replace
> quickly becomes bondage.

I don't disagree. But you're *not* going to get those features, in all
likelihood, in a Ruby 1.8.x release. It would be a breaking release.
Oniguruma is the default for Ruby 1.9+. If there are things missing,
work with the developer.

> I am maintaining a gem whose test fails due to different regexps in
> Oniguruma, but I would be able to quickly fix it knowing that
> Oniguruma is in stable now.

I don't think that Oniguruma is in stable (1.8.x); I *don't* think it
will be enabled as default in stable. Again, it's a breaking change.

>>> 10. Be flexible. <placeholder for future idea>
>> And little is more flexible than Matz's m17n String.
> I couldn't find a proper description of that - as I told already, the
> thing I'd least prefer would be

> # get a string from the database
> p str + my_unicode_chars # Ok, bail out with an ugly exception
> because the author of the DB adaptor didn't care to send me proper
> Strings...

The DB adaptor, of course, will have to look at the encoding that the DB
is using.

> If strings in the system are allowed to have varying encodings, I
> don't understand how the engine is going to upgrade/downgrade strings
> automatically.
> Especially remembering that the receiver is on the left, so I
> actually might get different exceptions going as I do
>
> p my_unicode_chars + mojikyo_str # who wins?
>
> or
>
> p mojikyo_str + my_unicode_chars # who wins?
>
> or (especially)
>
> p mojikyo_str +
> bytestring_that_i_just_grabbed_by_http_and_i_know_it_is_mojikyo_but_its_
> not # who wins?

Consider coersion in Numerics (ri Numeric#coerce). A similar framework
can be built for Strings.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/
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               * austin@zieglers.ca