From: Hal Fulton <hal9000@...>
Date: 2004-05-05T01:27:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Strange behaviour of Strings in Range

Mike Calder wrote:

[snip]

> But the original code that I code and test to work with &mylanguageofchoice; 
> MUST work with ANY other language, without change.  All other language users 
> must have to do to get my program to work in their language is to translate 
> fixed strings (and perhaps change GUI layouts because of sizings).  This is 
> absolutely basic and should be in the Ruby core.  I thought this kind of 
> thing was why we have OO.
> 
> How you do it, I don't care. I don't care what the internal representation is; 
> that's an implementation detail, the sort of thing that OO should be hiding 
> from me anyway.  All I know is I'm handling a string, and I want to do string 
> manipulations.  I don't care is it's Unicode or ASCII, Kanji or Kanuck.
> 
> Sorry, if I can't do that in Ruby, it's broken and, I'm afraid, unusable.

Can you do that with any language whatsoever? Don't say Java, because
it's limited to Unicode.

It's not a flame. It's an honest question. Is there any programming
language/environment *anywhere* where I18N issues are completely
abstracted away and everything is done "nicely"?

Hal