Unicode in Ruby now?

can anyone sum up the overall
conclusions of this lengthy discussion? that’s what
i’d like to hear.
i.e. does any encoding scheme out there do the job,
the whole job, and
nothing but the job? or are they all flawed and
somebody someday needs
to sit down and figure the problem out and fix it for
good?

Why yes, I would be glad to offer my opinions and thus
restart the whole thing from the beginning.

Conclusions:

1–There is no one unicode encoding scheme that fits
all purposes perfectly. This is why there are so many
schemes. I like UCS-2, but it’s not very
ideologically pure (merely fast and convenient).
Since I don’t see Ruby as a high-performance language
but rather as a high-versatility one, UTF-* might be
better. It really doesn’t seem all that important to
me.

2–All I and most people who use languages to handle
text want, is to think of strings of characters, and
to be able to I/O these character strings as byte
streams in appropriate encodings. Although everything
from MFC (yuck) to Java to C# to Angband LUA can
handle this basic functionality pretty well invisibly,
I don’t think the will to bring Ruby up to date is
there.

3–I think the best bet for an international Ruby
(which coincidentally would also be a threaded Ruby)
is a .NET version of Ruby (i.e. a Ruby interpreter
running in .NET, not a compiler that compiles Ruby to
.NET code). Arton’s NETRuby would seem to fit the
bill pretty well, but I can’t contact the author. The
project is sparsely documented and definitely
experimental, but the code seems to work fine… has
anyone tried to take it further?

Benjamin Peterson

x