[erlang-questions] byte() vs. char() use in documentation

[Masklinn]

On 2011-05-05, at 09:49 , Raimo Niskanen wrote:
>> In any case, the language must provide specific functions to work on strings
>> and characters. For instance, a logical character comparison must take into
>> account the Unicode equivalence.
> 
> That is as far as I know unimplemented funcionality. Some may fit into
> the unicode module, and some might be left to a text processing application
> to implement. Just to implement Unicode equivalence sounds complicated
> and as a moving target
Unicode is generally complicated, but it's also well-defined. The hard part
is creating the correct generator from the UC's data (and following format
evolutions), but the moving target itself (the spec) should mostly be
auto-tracked by the extractor/generator

> or somthing best implemented by OS libraries.
As far as I know, no OS provides that service. The only widespread
low-level Unicode library is ICU[0]. And it's both pretty old and pretty
big.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Components_for_Unicode