What are runes?

[Wouter Gazendam]

I've bumped into the concept of runes in the latest Newspeak source. It seems to me it is an Integer and the ascii or unicode value of a Character. What are they?

Thanks,

Wouter

[Gilad Bracha]

Runes are unicode code points (i.e., integers in the range 0 -10FFFF). Ryan has been working on improvements to the libraries. Someday we'll do true internationalization properly, but it is a complex topic.