Hey everyone, Since there has been a lot of talk about what the name of a new immutable string class should be, may I toss the name "boost::text" into the ring? The advantage of this name is that it explicitly conveys what it is meant for: working with human-readable text encoded in some implementation-specific form. The name "string" would then continue to have its current interpretation as a string of contiguous 8-bit chars. It has also been suggested that different classes be created for different UTF encodings. I propose that boost::text have the internal encoding be an implementation (and potentially platform-specific) detail. Since at the end of a serious of manipulations with the rope-like data structure one will have to do a final transformation to convert the text into a string of bytes anyway, that provides a natural point at which the desired encoding of the string of bytes can be specified. That is, given a boost::text object "t", one could convert it into a UTF-8 string by calling "t.utf8_c_str()", a UTF-16 string by calling "t.utf16_c_str()", and so on, depending on what the underlying API is expecting. Some of these calls might require recoding the text to a different encoding, so the internal encoding of boost::text could be optimized to whatever is most likely to be needed on that platform so that it is least likely to need recoding. Alternatively, the encoding could be specified as a parameter to the constructor and be carried around as a runtime parameter since nobody needs to know what it is until the final encoding of the string. Thoughts? Cheers, Greg