From: Dmitrii Dimandt <dmitriid@...>
Date: 2006-06-28T15:22:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?

On 6/28/06, Patrick Hurley <phurley@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/27/06, Berger, Daniel <Daniel.Berger@qwest.com> wrote:
> >
> > I'm sure there are *many* people using character access in "real world"
> > code.
>
> Raising my hand, but the question might be who does character access
> on _Unicode_ strings. I play with byte arrays all the time (sometimes
> with embedded strings), but very rarely (but I do) use string slicing
> against a Unicode string.
>

I guess, that would be anyone in East Europe with Cyrillic-based
alphabets :) Especially those dealing with web apps. *Sigh*

On the other hand, I wonder, who in his right mind would want to work
with _strings_ as with a sequence of bytes? ;-) 90% of developers out
there don't even know how encodings work. So all this manual to and
fro conversion, moving through bytes etc. etc. would only be perceived
as vodoo magic. *A deeper sigh*

> I am in the (unfortunate) position of dealing with many legacy binary
> files, encoded into a wide variety of pieces and parts -- I use string
> slicing, but more exactly I use byte array slicing (don't get me wrong
> -- I want to keep a single String class).
>

I wonder, what is wrong with making all strings Unicode by default
(this will ensure that most libraries don't automagically break once
Ruby is upgraded), _but_ let developers optionally decide whether they
want a different encoding:

s = new String #=> unicode string
sj = new String(:encoding => 'jis')
scp =  new String(:encoding => 'CP1251')
sb = new String(:binary => true) #=> work as ByteArray
sbf = new String(:encoding => 'funny encoding', :binary => true) #=>
work as ByteArray

There are numerous performance issues, I suppose. And other problems
like assignment operations. *Sigh*