From: Robert Klemme <bob.news@...>
Date: 2004-05-03T17:29:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Strange behaviour of Strings in Range


"Yukihiro Matsumoto" <matz@ruby-lang.org> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:1083540203.859920.6241.nullmailer@picachu.netlab.jp...
> Hi,
>
> In message "Re: Strange behaviour of Strings in Range"
>     on 04/05/03, Hal Fulton <hal9000@hypermetrics.com> writes:
>
> |Will Rite have a better-defined notion of "character"? Perhaps
including
> |Unicode and such?
>
> No.  The definition of "character" should belong to the application
> domain, I believe.  Considering internationalization, any particular
> definition of character can not satisfy all.

So then what's Unicode for in the first place?  I thought the aim was to
have a universal encoding for all chars.  Did I miss something?

IMHO Ruby as it is today determines the notion of "character" by the way
strings and regexps are handled and thus a char is a byte.  IMHO
characters are so basic that you can't delegate that to the application
domain.  You can delegate transformations but not having an internal
standard representation strikes me as difficult.

Maybe I'm overlooking something, if so, please let me know.

Regards

    robert