I liked your response a lot. Thank you. And I was almost persuaded by it. In fact I was persuaded for about 5 minutes after reading it. But at the last seco

I liked your response a lot. Thank you. And I was almost persuaded by it. In fact I was persuaded for about 5 minutes after reading it. But at the last second, a thought occurred to me: if there's a deficiency in Unicode that prevents its use for Japanese, isn't the right solution to just fix that deficiency? I mean, Unicode is meant to be an abstract representation of glyphs, separate from any encoding, that works for all of Earth's languages. It's tailor made to be a programming language's internal representation of a string. This is its raison d'etre. So it seems to me that #2 is definitely The Right Way™ and that if there's some problem with Unicode that has kept Ruby from adopting it, they should have worked on fixing it, rather than breaking Ruby. OK, "break" is probably too strong a word for the state of Ruby 1.9. And in the real world, fixing an international politicized standard like Unicode is probably impossible. So I can see that this pragmatic solution might have been the only one available. But still, it seems wrong to me. Out of curiosity, what exactly is the deficiency in Unicode that caused Matz to go with option 3? I presume there are epic flamewars all over the internet about this issue, but I just haven't been paying close enough attention.