On Jan 10, 2008, at 11:55 PM, Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> I don't think there's no string in Ruby without encoding.  Every
> string has their own encoding.  Allowing nil is pretty easy, but if it
> encourage the false conception (like you had), it might be better to
> remove it from long range view.  Let me think.

If I grab an Ethernet packet off the wire, part of it is going to be
binary data that has absolutely no relationship to characters/glyphs
yet part of it might be a TCP segment containing UTF-8 data from an
HTTP session.  What does it mean to have 'ASCII-8BIT' for such a
sequence?

I can understand the idea that every string has an encoding as long
as one of those encodings means "it's just bytes".  If 'ASCII-8BIT'
is that encoding, why is 'ASCII' even in the name?  It seems
intuitive to me that a 'nil' encoding be the 'bucket of bytes'
interpretation.

Gary Wright