On Jun 17, 2006, at 5:48 PM, Juergen Strobel wrote:
> The way I see it we have to choose a character set.

What leads you to this conclusion?  I don't think it can be refuted  
that there exists today an almost endless number of character sets  
and text encodings in use. I don't understand why the core facilities  
of a language should be intimately tied to any one of those  
representations.  Once you do that you've decided that all other  
representations are second class citizens.  Why not have the language  
be agnostic about these things but still provide a coherent framework  
for building libraries and applications that can be locale and  
encoding-aware?

Gary Wright