Hi Todd, it's taken me til now to put my thoughts into words on this issue.

I think we should make it work first.  This will allow us to gain more
insight into the issues, and create documentation about the process
that we, as a community, understand.

If ICU is the right way to go, we can *then* "make it right".




On 8 December 2015 at 22:36, Todd Blanchard <tblanchard at mac.com> wrote:
> I just want to second Dale's endorsement of the ICU library.  It has been
> around a long time (originally developed by Taligent) and it provides the
> base unicode capabilities for an awful lot of software.
>
> I think it would make more sense to bring icu into Smalltalk as a
> NativeBoost library than to spend resources reimplementing and maintaining
> it.
>
> -Todd Blanchard
>
> On Dec 8, 2015, at 11:20, Dale Henrichs <dale.henrichs at gemtalksystems.com>
> wrote:
>
> On 12/07/2015 11:31 PM, H. Hirzel wrote:
>
> Dale
>
> Thank you for your answer with links to the ICU library and the notes
> about classes in Gemstone. Noteworthy that you have a class Utf8 as a
> subclass of ByteArray.
>
> I understand that Gemstone uses the ICU library and thus does not
> implement the algorithms in Smalltalk.
>
> I am currently looking into what the  ICU  library provides.
>
>