Lua 5.1 and UTF-8 ?

[Asko Kauppi <askok@...>]

I've been thinking about UTF-8 and Lua lately, and wonder how much  
work it would be to actually support that in Lua "out of the box".   
There are some programming languages (s.a. Tck) that claim already to  
do that, and I feel the concept would match Lua's targets and  
philosophy rather nicely.

I understand UTF-8 might not be everyone's favourite, but it is  
mine. :) And having a working framework (str:bytes(), str:length(),  
str:width()) could easily be adopted to other extended encoding  
schemes as well.

The reason I'm bringing this up right now, is that the issue could  
suit nicely with the 5.1 "every type has a metatable" way of  
thinking; would it warrant an opportunity to have a closer look at  
what Lua means by 'strings' (or rather, their encoding) anyhow?

The only thing important for me (or.. end users in general?) would be  
not to have two different ways for strings.  "Hello" and L"Hello"  
should not be necessary, imho.  In UTF-8, they aren't.

-ak

UTF-8 in a nutshell:
    http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#utf-8