Okay, I give. Against my better judgement, I'm declaring Unicode the
One True Character String Encoding Set Stuff Thingie. It's not quite
going to be as simple as that, as folks will likely track me down and
beat me if we utf-8 decode their JPEG data, and there's plenty of
non-Unicode data out there that folks are going to want to process
properly (if for no other reason than to write edge encoders and
decoders in parrot. And perl 5, python, and ruby backward
compatibility....) but, well... Unicode it is, as much as feasable.
Dammit.

I've got a strings architecture document I'm in the middle of
revising. Hopefully today or tomorrow, at least in time to make
Piers' life more interesting.
--
                                         Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
d...@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                       teddy bears get drunk