From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2002-08-02T05:42:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode in Ruby now?

Hi,

In message "Re: Unicode in Ruby now?"
    on 02/08/02, Jan Witt <ontologist_2000@yahoo.com> writes:

|I beg your pardon,
|you have all the wonderful standards at your 
|fingertips.

Probably you're asking Curt, but I will answer what I can.

|What is meant by "representing" a character?
|What are the attributes of a code point?

A code point is a number index to a character.  "representing" a
character means encoding, for example:

  Japanese Hiragana "Ka" has a code point 9252 in JIS
  EUC encoded "Ka" is "\xa4\xab".

  Japanese Hiragana "Ka" has a code point 12363 in Unicode
  UTF-8 encoded "Ka" is "\xe3\x81\x8b".

|Outside of natural language text processing,
|are there areas where the parsing of 
|non-Latin-1 strings is relevant? If so,
|what are they?

Because some people in the world need it to represent their daily
text.  My mail, memo, journal, and almost everything are written in
non-Latin-1 string (EUC-JP).

							matz.