Hi, 

In message "[ruby-talk:01033] Re: Is this a bug?"
    on 00/01/03, Dave Thomas <Dave / thomases.com> writes:
>>   % cat foo.rb
>>   = 1 
>>   % od -t x1 foo.rb
>0000000 e0 20 3d 20 31 0a
>0000006

I see, it is iso-8859-1 (Emacs recognized as iso-latin-1-unix). 
Ruby treats it as two byte character and the next character of is 
treated as the second byte of a character. So, the following *seems*
to work well:

  = 1
  p #

because ruby assign 1 to a local variable "". 

I think it is a kind of bug.  Maybe, it will take some long time to
solve it and get been stable.

-- gotoken