From: Juergen Strobel <strobel@...>
Date: 2006-06-23T00:32:18+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?

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On Wed, Jun 21, 2006 at 01:04:55AM +0900, Tim Bray wrote:
> On Jun 20, 2006, at 6:54 AM, Timothy Bennett wrote:
>=20
> >Having different encodings on one web page is a good way to make =20
> >sure that
> >the page won't display correctly
> ...
> >  So, no, I don't think it should
> >be valid to concatenate strings with different encodings.
>=20
> Well, unless you had a String class that took care of the encoding =20
> details and, when you were ready to output, allowed you to say "Give =20
> me that in ISO-8859 or UTF-8 or whatever". -Tim

That's what I suggested basically. The problem seems to be non-Unicode
demands mainly, and performance issues on the other hand. And it makes
Strings useless as byte buffers, since you have to specifiy the
encoding of the external representation you create the String from at
creation time. To recap:

Private extensions to Unicode are deemed too complex to implement
(Matz).=20

Transforming legacy or special (non Unicode) data to a ruby-private
internal storage format on I/O is too performance/space intensive
(Matz).

Strings as byte buffers are important to some people, and they don't
want to use another class or array for it, even if RegExp et al would
be extended to handle these too.

While it would be proper OO design, encapsulating the internal String
implementation hampers direct access to the "raw" data for C-hackers,
creating unwanted hurdles, and again performance issues.=20


I am still not convinced the arguments against this approach really
will hold in the long run, but since I am not the one implementing it
and can't really participate there due to language barriers, I can
only lean back and wait for the first realease of M17N. Learning
English was hard enough for me.

-J=FCrgen

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

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