From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2002-05-11T01:54:51+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode in Ruby's Future?

Hi,

In message "Unicode in Ruby's Future?"
    on 02/05/11, Chris Gehlker <gehlker@fastq.com> writes:

|This implies that we may expect a character to be something other than a
|byte in the near future. I started to search the archives but thought that
|there are enough other newbies on this list that a summary of the plans
|would be useful to many of us. Would some knowledgeable person please post a
|synopsis of where Ruby is going  in this area. It would be very helpful if
|it contained hints about how to write code that wont break during the
|transition.

Ruby will support m17n (MultilingualizatioN) in the future.  It means:

   + string indexing is based on character, even for multi-byte
     characters.
   + regex routine understands multi-byte character strings.
   + user can define new character encoding scheme.
   + Ruby will shipped with support for ASCII, Latin-1, UTF-8, EUC-JP,
     SJIS, and probably more.
   + the goal of Ruby M17N is string manipulation without code
     conversion.
   + but there still be need for code conversion, but its spec is not
     fixed yet, probably it will use iconv.

If you don't use multi-byte characters, there will be no
incompatibility.  If you do, string indexing for multi-byte character
string is not recommended; use regex match instead.

							matz.