Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:16856] RE: national characters is strings"
    on 01/06/25, "Aleksei Guzev" <aleksei.guzev / bigfoot.com> writes:

|Are Japanese characters of arbitrary length?

Well, no.  But we have toooo many characters, so that we need
multi-bytes to represent each character.  There's a chacater set
defined in Japan which contains more than 170,000 characters, and is
still growing.  How can they be converted into Unicode?

Altough we don't use most of them (I confess I know just a few
thousands of characters), they matter sometimes for somebody.  I just
can't claim we don't need them.

							matz.