Ruby svn has some support for Unicode codepoints

A couple of years ago I looked at Ruby to see what the fuss was all about.

I found a clean language with a couple of features that I really liked (the blocks with yield stuff) but also two major annoyances:

• their version of CPAN was very limited at the time in the areas that I required (namely asynchronous network programming and XMPP libs);
• lousy support for Unicode handling.

The library has been growing, and although you can find good XMPP libraries now, I still didn't see anything like the AnyEvent Perl framework. I saw someone (forgot where) mentioning something called rev, but so far I could not find any solid references to it.

The Unicode was the most sticky point at the time, and the reason why I didn't keep learning Ruby. I though I'll wait for a ruby implementation with full Unicode support to look at it again.

Apparently, 1.9 might be said release. The latest SVN version has something called String#each_codepoint that seems a step in the right direction.

I'll wait for the final release to look at it again, but its nice to know that something is coming.

By the way, I'm not thinking about stopping using Perl, not in a million years. I just use a lot of Ruby-based projects and I want to add some features on some of them, that's all.