Hello, I read quite a few blog posts, articles, listen to nice number to talks about strings, runes and encoding in Go. I now reading Go Language Spec and I just stuck in the section about runes. I mean, it isn't hard as itself, but it raises to much questions to me. I decided that I need to learn more about Unicode and UTF-8, so from today I'm reading Unicode Technical Site (?), currently the Glossary (https://www.unicode.org/glossary/). But I can't understand one thing: when in practice you should use runes?
My understanding at this moment is like that. Unicode assign every symbol a number (at this moment I disregard normalization and any other more advance stuff), rune is alias for int32 that stores integer representation of this number. UTF-8 is variable size encoding using one or more bytes to encode symbol and shouldn't and DOESN'T represent integer value of symbols Unicode number. Virtues of UTF-8 are clear as how it allows to save a space is clear to me, but I can't find a reason why I should transform my text to runes? In Go stdlib there is a RuneReader interface (?) so this reason must exists, but I just can't find anything. Maybe it have something to do with sending information using internet? I don't know, this is totally outside my humble knowledge. You can say, that since I don't see a reason to use runes, I probably shouldn't care about it. This is a valid point, but I want to know Go reasonable well and constantly find code with runes which reason of existence I don't understand (e.g. functions in stdlib that operates on runes) is quite demoralising to me. Best Kamil -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "golang-nuts" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to golang-nuts+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/golang-nuts/f3dad0e1-cd25-4e33-a7f2-34e0118bf68an%40googlegroups.com.
