From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2002-08-02T01:19:53+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode in Ruby now?

Hi,

In message "Re: Unicode in Ruby now?"
    on 02/08/01, Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net> writes:

|Well, what Java does works fine for me. Basically, java has "streams"
|which do binary I/O, and "readers/writers" which do character I/O. So to
|do character I/O, you hand your InputStream or OutputStream to a class
|that implements the InputReader or OutputWriter interface, and does the
|charecter encoding conversion. Typically methods that open files or
|whatever and return a reader or writer will have two signatures: one
|which uses the "system default" character encoding (set by the locale
|when you start the JVM), and the other where you can explicitly specify
|the character encoding as a parameter.
|
|This makes it easy to write "auto-sensing" InputReaders, too; so
|long as they can read enough in advance of the first read from the
|consumer, they can buffer it and look to see if it's, for example,
|Shift_JIS versus EUC-JP.

Thank you for information.

|BTW, I'd prefer to use the term "character encoding" rather than
|"character set," as technically, the character set is just the
|characters themselves, and not their assigment to binary numbers
|or number sequences. Also, it would probably be best to use the
|IANA standards for character encoding (though they call them
|"character sets") names, available at
|
|    http://www.iana.org/assignments/character-sets

I use the following definitions:

  character set:
    the set of characters with number assigned to each character.

  code point:
    the assigned number for each character in particular
    character set

  character encoding scheme:
    the way to represent sequence of code points.

Mojikyo is a character set.  Unicode is a character set.  UTF-8 is a
character encoding scheme for Unicode.  Shift_JIS is a character
encoding scheme.  ISO 10646 defines both character set and encoding
scheme.

							matz.