From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2006-06-19T22:31:43+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?

On 6/19/06, Dmitrii Dimandt <dmitriid@gmail.com> wrote:
> I wonder. Why cannot Strings throughout Ruby be _always_ represented
> as Unicode and why no let ICU handle the conversion between various
> encodings for incoming and outgoing data?
> (http://www.ibm.com/software/globalization/icu/). I know, it is a
> long-stanbding issue on Unicode's Han unification process, but without
> proper Unicode support Ruby is destined to be a toy for
> English-speaking and Japanese communities only. (And as I'm gearing up
> to prepare a web-site in Russian, Turkish and English, I feel that
> using Ruby could prove to be a major pain in the nether regions of my
> body :) )

This entire discussion is centered around a proposal to do exactly
that. There are many *very good* reasons to avoid doing this. Unicode
Is Not Always The Answer.

It's *usually* the answer, but there are times when it's just easier
to work with data in an established code page.

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