On 18-jun-2006, at 0:21, Austin Ziegler wrote:
>
>> I am unaware of unsolveable problems with Unicode and Eastern
>> languages, I asked specifically about it. If you think Unicode is
>> unfixably flawed in this respect, I guess we all should write off
>> Unicode now rather than later? Can you detail why Unicode is
>> unacceptable as a single world wide unifying character set?
>> Especially, are there character sets which cannot be converted to
>> Unicode and back, which is the main requirement to have Unicode
>> Strings in a non-Unicode environment?
>
> Legacy data and performance.

Yes, you will spend those cycles to count the letters in my language  
RIGHT :-)) (evil grin)
It's actually the most common case when apps damage strings in my  
language - their authors wanted to be smart
and _conserve_. And yes, normalization etc. is complex and you DO  
need to have a case-conversion table in memory. Please do have one
(Ruby doesn't).

No offense, just observation.
--
Julian 'Julik' Tarkhanov
please send all personal mail to
me at julik.nl