From: Daniel DeLorme <dan-ml@...42.com>
Date: 2006-08-01T18:05:59+09:00
Subject: Re: state of unicode support

Paul Battley wrote:
>> > 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?

I second that. I see a lot of people asking for "transparent" unicode support 
but I don't see how that is possible. To me it's like asking for a language that 
has transparent bug recovery. I know that ruby has weaknesses when it comes to 
multibyte encodings, but the main problem is human in nature; too many people 
assume that char==byte, which results in bugs when someone unexpectedly uses 
"weird" characters. IMHO no amount of "transparent support" will change that. 
But I would love to be shown otherwise with examples of languages that "do it 
right".

Daniel