I've taken a look  at m17n.

What encoding will have sum of two strings ( via "+" ) ?
Now I use English, Russian, German, Esperanto. Next year I plan to start
studying Japanese ( did I spell it corrrectly? ). 
How could I combine Japanese and Russian strings?
Suppose I read user input. What encoding has the input string?

I'm afraid all those questions ( if unanswered ) would lead to Unicode.
The list of problems is at IBM's site I metioned earlier.
Using IBM's OpenSource Unicode project seems to be the solution. 

Please, take a look :)


# -----Original Message-----
# From: Yukihiro Matsumoto [mailto:matz / zetabits.com] 
# Sent: 25 ???? 2001 ?. 14:47
# To: ruby-talk ML
# Subject: [ruby-talk:16846] Re: national characters is strings # 
# 
# Hi,
# 
# In message "[ruby-talk:16845] Re: national characters is strings"
#     on 01/06/25, "Aleksei Guzev" <aleksei.guzev / bigfoot.com> writes:
# 
# |I'll help as soon as You call. I like C++ much more than 
# Assembler :)))
# 
# When you have spare time, could you check out and see Ruby 
# M17N from :pserver:anonymous / cvs.ruby-lang.org:/ruby -r ruby_m17n ? # 
# 							matz.
#