If someone's got the time and I spec out the encoding and charset APIs, I'd be thrilled if ICU became optional again. Wouldn't hurt my feelings at all. We need it, because we need Unicode, but it doesn't have to be required.
We'll need something that isn't ICU if we're going to do the miniparrot thing.
Of course, in the case of miniparrot, it may be possible to forgo unicode altogether, or use a very limited form of it.
I don't think it would be a great loss if miniparrot's "Unicode" implementation consisted of support for Unicode characters 0..127, encoded in UTF-8. (In other words, classic US-ASCII.)
-- Brent "Dax" Royal-Gordon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Perl and Parrot hacker
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
