Re: [Caml-list] GSoC: better UTF-8 support

["Daniel Bünzli" <daniel.buenzli@erratique.ch>]

> If it's to go into the standard library then yes, it should exactly replicate the interface of the Char and String modules, that way within the standard library UTF8 can be used as a drop-in replacement
[...]

I'm not sure many programs would actually benefit from that. At a
certain point if you really want to process unicode at the character
level you'll need a proper library. Using these ascii/latin1 oriented
interfaces to process unicode at the character level would be
debilitating and frustrating for your final users (e.g. no treatement
of normal forms, you do realize that in unicode there's more than one
way of representing the character 'é').

The current status quo already allows you to treat UTF-8 encoded
string if you don't try to look into them at the character level which
is fine for many programs.

> Out of interest, what are your complaints against the String and Char modules - missing functions or something deeper?

Every time I have to explode a string at a given separator and want to
use only the standard library I complain.

> It is mildly amusing that you criticise the String and Char modules, yet have interest in this module given
[...]

The thing is that this support could be included without changing the
interfaces at all. Only the regexp language needs to be extended (and
I guess the underlying implementation wouldn't have to be changed).

Best,

Daniel