From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2006-06-22T00:34:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?

On 6/21/06, Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@ruby-lang.org> wrote:
> I recommend using "ascii" encoding, which is default, for library
> files, unless you are sure in what encoding your input data are.
> For localization, tools like gettext would help dealing with strings
> in the native encoding.

Just a thought. Might it be possible to have a new String literal for
what will be, I think, the most common encoding chosen (UTF-8)? That is,
in addition to:

  # -*- coding: EUC-JP -*-
  "<text>" # tagged as EUC-JP

We allow:

  # -*- coding: EUC-JP -*-
  "<text>" # tagged as EUC-JP
  u"<text>" # tagged as UTF-8

Despite my belief that we should avoid an enforced universal encoding as
the String representation, I *do* plan on making most of my applications
and libraries UTF-8 friendly and aware. It's extremely important that we
be able to work with this cleanly, and if I can simply do either u"foo"
or U"foo" I would find it much easier to deal with in those places where
I need UTF-8/Unicode support.

-austin
-- 
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