> Swift has probably the most comprehensive Unicode string API I've seen Perl 6 has long specified an interesting and rich approach to Unicode. Have you explor

> Swift has probably the most comprehensive Unicode string API I've seen Perl 6 has long specified an interesting and rich approach to Unicode. Have you explored it? (An initial implementation for an initial release of the Rakudo compiler was worked on over the last few years and declared done, modulo bugs, a few weeks ago. A recent blog post provides a friendly overview.[1].) One notable difference is that Swift adopts an iteration-only view of strings for dealing with characters whereas Perl 6 does not. One consequence is that indexing operations in Perl 6 are O(1) (time) at the expense of potentially (and for the current implementation, typically) greater use of RAM. > BTW to your point on len(x) + len(y). The answer is 2 if you define len() on Unicode scalars but 1 if you define it on characters. Why? because len("\u301") should be 0. Are you 100% sure of this of your last sentence ("should be 0")? I get that it's intuitively reasonable that an isolated base modifier be length 0 but I thought the Unicode standard specified (or at least recommended) that it be 1, and I note that Perl 6 treats isolated base modifiers (or at least this particular one) as length 1: > ("a").chars 1 > (0x301.chr).chars 1 > ("a" ~ 0x301.chr).chars 1 So both Swift and Perl 6 correctly report the length of "a" as 1 and an "a" concatenated with "\u301" as 1 but disagree on what to do with an isolated base modifier. > It is, of course, true that getting this right is likely to be substantially more expensive than getting it wrong but that doesn't mean it can't be done. Indeed. [1] https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/07/day-7-unicode-perl-6-and-you/ https://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2015/12/07/day-7-unicode-p...