From: Juergen Strobel <strobel@...>
Date: 2006-06-18T05:31:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?

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On Sun, Jun 18, 2006 at 01:02:39AM +0900, Paul Battley wrote:
> On 17/06/06, Austin Ziegler <halostatue@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> - This ties Ruby's String to Unicode. A safe choice IMHO, or would we
> >> really consider something else? Note that we don't commit to a
> >> particular encoding of Unicode strongly.
> >
> >This is a wash. I think that it's better to leave the options open.
> >After all, it *is* a hope of mine to have Ruby running on iSeries
> >(AS/400) and *that* still uses EBCDIC.

AFAIK, EBCDIC can be losslessly converted to Unicode and back. Right?

On the other hand, do you really trust all ruby library writers to
accept your strings tagged with EBCDIC encoding? Or do you look
forward to a lot of manual conversions?

> Not to mention that Matz has explicitly stated in the past that he
> wants Ruby to support other encodings (TRON, Mojikyo, etc.) that
> aren't compatible with a Unicode internal representation.
>=20
> Not tying String to Unicode is also the right thing to do: it allows
> for future developments. Java's weird encoding system is entirely down
> to the fact that it standardised on UCS-2; when codepoints beyond
> 65535 arrived, they had to be shoehorned in via an ugly hack. As far
> as possible, Ruby should avoid that trap.
>=20
> Paul.

That's why I explicitly stated it ties Ruby's String class to Unicode
Character Code Points, but not to a particular Unicode encoding or
character class, and *that* was Java's main folly. (UCS-2 is a
strictly 16 bit per character encoding, but new Unicode standards
specify 21 bit characters, so they had to "extend" it).

I am unaware of unsolveable problems with Unicode and Eastern
languages, I asked specifically about it. If you think Unicode is
unfixably flawed in this respect, I guess we all should write off
Unicode now rather than later? Can you detail why Unicode is
unacceptable as a single world wide unifying character set?
Especially, are there character sets which cannot be converted to
Unicode and back, which is the main requirement to have Unicode
Strings in a non-Unicode environment?

J=FCrgen

--=20
 The box said it requires Windows 95 or better so I installed Linux

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