Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> Alright, then what specific features are you (both) missing?  I don't
> think it is a method to get number of characters in a string.  It
> can't be THAT crucial.  I do want to cover "your missing features" in
> the future M17N support in Ruby.

Sorry for maybe getting into, but here are my 5 cents. When I first 
found out about ruby, I practically almost fell in love with the 
language. Unfortunately, after some studying and experimenting I 
suddenly found that it lacks proper unicode support on win32, in 
particular with file IO and ole automation, i.e. in two cases where I 
had to interoperate with the rest of the world. Win32 really differs 
from Linux and maybe other Unixes in API because in *nix you don't have 
to worry about unicode/whatever, because all of the system depends on 
your current locale. In win32 there are two sets of API, ansi and 
unicode, maybe that was a bad microsoft's decision, but that's a 
reality. Now I am a Russian, and when I write scripts I have to worry 
that not only Russian characters don't get messed up, but characters of 
other languages as well. So that if I receive, say, excel file with a 
lot of languages in that, and I have to process that file somehow I have 
to be sure that no letters will be lost, nor messed up, thus converting 
it to current codepage (1251) is no option for me. The same is with 
filenames, the fact that I'm running russian winxp doesn't mean that I 
have only filenames that fall in 1251 codepage, I also have filenames 
with european characters (umlauts and such), as well as japanese, and 
when I want to write some script that processes these files, I have to 
be able to work with them. At that time this caused me to move to Tcl 
(it has utf-8 encoding everywhere, and it converts to required encoding 
when interoperating with the world). Since then I'm still waiting for 
proper unicode support in ruby (read: proper interoperability with 
operating system and its components using unicode API versions: the ones 
ending with W) and maybe a way to define in which locale (specific code 
page, utf-8, etc) the current script is running.

Hope that clarifies what is currently missing for me (and maybe others, 
I don't know).

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