[masklinn]

> "correctly handling unicode" can be subjective and case-dependent...

So is correctly handling integers.

> I think making only minimal guarantees and punting to the application is often the only sane course.

That is completely and utterly crazy, the average developer has neither the knowledge nor the resources to make anything but a mess out of it without proper tools and APIs. Even with these (including a complete implementation of the unicode standard and its technical reports) unicode is already complex enough to deal with.

[snogglethorpe]

Of course it's not "completely and utterly crazy."

Not every app needs to deal with the enormous complexities implied by "full unicode support", and given the huge cost of that, there's a real place for a minimalist approach. If all I do with unicode is input strings from the user, store them in a database, and then later spit them out, I don't need to be able to do Turkish case-conversion, and I may not want to pay the cost of making it possible.

Certainly tools and APIs help for those cases where an app needs to do the sort of complicated text-processing that warrants "full" unicode support, but it's not at all clear that the proper place for such support is in the base language libraries. It's quite reasonable for the language implementors to say "if you want to do X, we'll support that, but if you want to do Y and Z, please use external library L."

[masklinn]

> Not every app needs to deal with the enormous complexities implied by "full unicode support", and given the huge cost of that, there's a real place for a minimalist approach.

Not sure what point you're trying to make, I never said all applications had to make full use of all possible Unicode APIs, I said the language must expose them. Because if it doesn't, those who should use them will never become aware of them let alone use them.

> If all I do with unicode is input strings from the user, store them in a database, and then later spit them out, I don't need to be able to do Turkish case-conversion, and I may not want to pay the cost of making it possible.

So?

> It's quite reasonable for the language implementors to say "if you want to add numbers, we'll support that, but if you want to subtract or divide them, please use external library L."

Really?

Then again, considering Go's embedded contempt for non-US locales (see: datetime patterns) I'm not even sure why we're having this discussion, and since it's obvious they don't care for a non-US world it make sense that they wouldn't care for processing text.

And at the end of the day, you agree that Go has no provision for unicode handling, you just think it's all fine and dandy.