[Openmcl-devel] Plans for Unicode support within OpenMCL?

[Takehiko Abe]

Gary Byers wrote:

> "Plans" in the sense of "general agreement that it'd be good and
necessary and
> should really be done someday, and some thoughts about how to do it" : yes.
> 
> "Plans" in the sense of "concrete effort, funded or voluntary" : sadly no.
> 
> There are certainly some technical and design issues to be resolved;
> there was some discussion of those issues here a couple of years ago:

I used to think that characters should be implemented with unicode
direct codepoints. I've changed my mind since and now believe
that having base-string with latin-1 and extended-string with
UTF-16 is good enough for dealing with unicode. We (ok i am not sure
who we are) can add UTF-32 string later in case UTF-16 string turns
out to be inadequate.

If having multiple string types is not desirable, I think UTF-16
string is a good compromise. The 4-fold increase of string size
is too much.

Unicode has combining characters and covers lots of scripts/writing
systems. Handling them is inherently hard and having characters
with unicode direct codepoints does not make it easier much, imo. 


T.