From: Paul Battley <pbattley@...>
Date: 2006-08-01T01:51:47+09:00
Subject: Re: state of unicode support

On 31/07/06, Julian 'Julik' Tarkhanov <listbox@julik.nl> wrote:
>
> On 31-jul-2006, at 17:48, Paul Battley wrote:
> > Whilst it's certainly useless for a lot of tasks, I'm not sure that
> > Ruby is any worse than other languages in this regard. As far as I'm
> > aware, most languages that 'support' Unicode don't handle grapheme
> > clusters without using additional libraries.
>
> AFAIK Python regexps do that properly, and ICU does for sure (both as
> free iterators and regexps).

That's what I mean: ICU is a separate library, not part of a language
core. We can use ICU in Ruby too - it's still pre-alpha and not
seamless, but the possibility exists. From what I've read, Python
doesn't do the heavyweight stuff natively, either. (Please tell me if
I'm wrong - I don't use Python.)

> > Actually, that's a really good idea. Which languages/frameworks have
> > you found that actually do it right? We could learn from their
> > example.
>
> To my knowledge you are intimately familiar with the subject so I
> take it as sarcasm.

I'm not being sarcastic at all, though perhaps I could have phrased it
better. It's just that all Unicode discussions in Ruby end up going
round and round in circles; if we as a community could identify some
first-class examples of Doing It Right, I think we'd have some useful
yardsticks. You are someone with particularly high expectations
(rightly so) of Unicode support in a language: have you found anything
that really impressed you?

> But if you really feel like being constructive you can update the
> Unicode gem (wich you promised about a month ago) :-))

I promised I'd try :-) Thanks for the reminder, though! I'll get on with it.

Paul.