Re: Unicode

[RLake@...]

> Any thought for doing generic string type support, like numbers with
> the LUA_NUMBER?

> It would be nice to have (the option of) a Unicode version without
> having to muck with the Lua source all over the place.

IMHO, Unicode is much more complicated than a simple "byte" string. And it
is very useful that
Lua provides simple "byte" strings. AFAIK Lua should work with "bytes"
which are bigger than
eight bits, and that for me is adequate. I'd like to see Unicode support,
yes, but as something
built on top of strings, not as a replacement.

Actually, I'd like to see strings be real octet strings; that way one could
reliably write
Unicode handling in Lua itself; as well as being able to parse and generate
"binary"
files. The option of "multibyte" strings could also be implemented as
library functions.

Unicode, however, is much more than string manipulation. Note, for example,
that
concatenation is not closed on normalised Unicode strings; proper support
for
such idiosyncracies is a higher-level function.

Rici