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On Sun, Jun 18, 2006 at 07:22:34AM +0900, gwtmp01 / mac.com wrote:
> 
> 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
> 

Maybe I was unclear. I did't mean Ruby has too choose an existing
standard, but Ruby has to choose which set of characters to handle in
Strings, in the mathematical sense.

Language implementation, and usage of the String class should be
easier if this set is

- well defined 

Unicode code points are pretty good in this respect, better than the
union of all characters in all encodings of possible M17N Strings.
And we may use private extensions to Unicode for legacy characters not
included in Unicode already.

- All characters are equally allowed in all Strings.

M17N fails this one. a[5] = b[3] if their encodings are incompatible?

At best it'll coerce a to an encoding which can handle both, which
would be Unicode 98% of the time any way, 1% something else, and 1%
totally fail. Don't nail me down on the numbers.

Mathematically, String functions should be defined on the whole set,
not subsets, or their application becomes a chore.

Jgen

-- 
 The box said it requires Windows 95 or better so I installed Linux

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