From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2006-06-26T14:49:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?

On 6/25/06, Charles O Nutter <headius@headius.com> wrote:
> One clarification I'd like to add to this: I'm not saying that a ByteArray
> needs to be added, but if you're going to treat String as a ByteArray, then
> perhaps there should be another type for character vectors?

There's no meaningful distinction between the division of
ByteArray/String and String/CharString. I do *not* believe that this
is a viable option. The *sole* argument in favour is that we could add
a CharString to Ruby 1.8 -- but I believe that this would be
stampeding us in the wrong direction.

Even if CharString < String, there will be problems -- people already
note that there are issues with subclasses of the built-in classes.

> My only point about the dichotomy between <byte collection treated as a
> string> and <character collection treated as a string> is that at some
> level, they imply different behaviors, different APIs, different interfaces.
> Perhaps the answer is not to change existing Ruby code to use a m17n String
> while trying to retain byte array capabilities in the same time...but maybe
> it's worth considering that the new behavior warrants a separate type?

This is where I disagree with you completely. If I have a String that
contains ISO-8859-15 data, it *happens* that s#byte_count and s#length
are the same value. It differs with UTF-8 data, but the interpretation
of a Character is, at best, a *trait* of the data being stored. I have
*really* given this a lot of thought, and I really do think that Matz
is right about this and that the people who want Unicode-native
strings are wrong. This sort of sucks for JRuby because of problems
with Java. But I do not think that Sun made the right decision with
Java. If nothing else, they ended up backing a dead "standard" during
the initial phases, and have had to hack out since then.

> I know you (matz) want to break as much as possible with the 2.0 release,
> but I still don't see the advantage of marrying the "byte array string" and
> "char string" types in the same class when separate types and behaviors
> would be more logical and break far less.

It *isn't* more logical. It doubles the number of required APIs for
IO. It *completely* complicates things from that perspective, with
little value for the people who have to implement character-oriented
data routines.

-austin
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