From: Tim Bray <tbray@...>
Date: 2006-06-18T13:59:54+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?

On Jun 17, 2006, at 3:22 PM, gwtmp01@mac.com wrote:

>> The way I see it we have to choose a character set.
>
> What leads you to this conclusion?  I don't think it can be refuted  
> that there exists today an almost endless number of character sets  
> and text encodings in use. I don't understand why the core  
> facilities of a language should be intimately tied to any one of  
> those representations.  Once you do that you've decided that all  
> other representations are second class citizens.  Why not have the  
> language be agnostic about these things but still provide a  
> coherent framework for building libraries and applications that can  
> be locale and encoding-aware?

I'm not close enough to Ruby to have a useful opinion, but for many  
other software systems, the designers decided that the performance  
and interoperability gains achievable by limiting themselves to  
Unicode were a compelling enough argument, and so chose.

In particular, these days, both the W3C and the IETF overwhelmingly  
specify the use of Unicode characters when text is to be included in  
protocols or data delivery formats.  So even if you can handle lots  
of non-Unicode stuff, the Net may have difficulty getting it to you. - 
Tim