I'm not an expert on internationalization, so please be patient...

For people in iso-8859-x locales, I suspect we could get Ruby to
support their 8-bit characters in regexps and identifiers by simply
calling 'setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "")' during initialization, and by having 
-Kn be the default KCODE. The 8-bit characters would get passed in to
isalnum(), which should use the locale information

Could anyone with experience comment - is this too simplistic? Does
setlocale() work on Windows?

On a related note-is there an English description of what -K and
$KCODE do anywhere?


Regards

Dave