From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2008-04-10T15:13:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby's not ready - an indepth essay

On Apr 7, 2008, at 21:05 PM, Phillip Gawlowski wrote:
> Austin Ziegler wrote:
>
> | (Yes, Virginia. Most people don't need full-on Unicode munging in
> | their code. It's necessary when you do need it, but most people  
> don't
> | need it.)
>
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html
>
> I need it. Most of Europe needs it. Not to mention Arabia, Japan, and
> everybody else not speaking English.

I think you'll find disagreement that Japan wants it, or needs it.   
Han unification (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification) is one  
reason why there is discomfort with it, and if you search around the  
archives for emails from Matz containing Unicode, you should find a  
couple others that describe why Ruby 1.9's M17N features are taking  
the path they are.

I think it would be simpler to just switch everything to be Unicode- 
only than to take the path of Ruby 1.9.  Instead, Ruby 1.9 supports  
many character encodings, and I have to believe that there's a good  
reason behind that.