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

[Yoriyuki Yamagata <yoriyuki.y@gmail.com>]

Sorry, I didn't notice this thread since caml-list did not reach me
sometime.  So allow me to jump in the discossion.

 I think the entire discussion went a bit astray.  It seems for me
that the argument goes to specify the project detail as much as
possible. According to my experience being a GSoC menter (Yes, I was),
students often come up with better idea than menter.  Therefore,
instead of specifying the details, we'd better specify a general
direction and let the students decide.

As the general direction, I think we need
1) light weight stdlib replacement:   Data type for Unicode chars and
strings.  Extensible character encofing, and simple IO.  Interfaces
shoud be purely functinal as far as possible.  For example string wil
be imutable, IO is monadic etc...

2) minimal language extension: unocode character and string literal.
Unicode aware toplevel(pretty printing) etc...

This is no means a complete support of Unicode, but having this in
stdlib we can add more feature of Unicode standard (through for
example camomile) or modify third party library to use Unicode.

Best,


-- 
Yoriyuki Yamagata
yoriyuki.y@gmail.com
http://sites.google.com/site/yoriyukiy/<https://sites.google.com/site/yoriyukiy/>