Chapter 4. Internationalization in Ruby
Therefore, [the place] was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
—Genesis 11:9
Earlier we said that character data was arguably the most important data type. But what do we mean by character data? Whose characters, whose alphabet, whose language and culture?
In the past computing has had an Anglocentric bias, perhaps going back as far as Charles Babbage. This is not necessarily a bad thing. We had to start somewhere, and it might as well be with an alphabet of 26 letters and no diacritic marks (accents and other marks added to a base character).
But computing is a global phenomenon now. ...
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