Ignoring the bad simile (which others have pointed out), adding Unicode support for someone who has done it in MzScheme before probably is no more than a couple days' work, if that. The changes can be done in the bowels of the implementation and then submitted as a patch, just like any other open source project. The PHP library problems don't have to occur, because it doesn't have to be in a library.
I agree with you that adding Unicode support on top of a language is a terrible idea. But when the language's authors have said that compatibility in future versions is not an issue, when they open source the language, and when one of them says,
MzScheme, which the current version of Arc compiles to, has some more advanced plan for dealing with characters. But it would probably have taken me a couple days to figure out how to interact with it, and I don't want to spend even one day dealing with character sets.
to me, that is coming right out and saying, "Hey, I didn't feel like figuring out character sets, but I know MzScheme has a way of doing it. I'd love for you to do what you need to in order to get this working, because it doesn't interest me."
Also, if someone gave me a gift car with a wooden chassis, I would be quite happy with it. I'd drive it while it worked, and when it got to be enough of an annoyance, I'd take the car apart and rebuild it on a steel one. I certainly wouldn't bitch about it.
I agree with you that adding Unicode support on top of a language is a terrible idea. But when the language's authors have said that compatibility in future versions is not an issue, when they open source the language, and when one of them says,
MzScheme, which the current version of Arc compiles to, has some more advanced plan for dealing with characters. But it would probably have taken me a couple days to figure out how to interact with it, and I don't want to spend even one day dealing with character sets.
to me, that is coming right out and saying, "Hey, I didn't feel like figuring out character sets, but I know MzScheme has a way of doing it. I'd love for you to do what you need to in order to get this working, because it doesn't interest me."
Also, if someone gave me a gift car with a wooden chassis, I would be quite happy with it. I'd drive it while it worked, and when it got to be enough of an annoyance, I'd take the car apart and rebuild it on a steel one. I certainly wouldn't bitch about it.