On 6/25/06, Izidor Jerebic <ij.rubylist / gmail.com> wrote:
> If Ruby wants to move forward, it needs transparent String support and
> hopefully separation of String and ByteArray, since this un-
> separation brought us code which is mostly wrong (currently most of
> existing Ruby code breaks if string encoding is honoured, as can be
> seen from experience of brave people who modified String class).

This is an incorrect and unsupportable statement. It is completely
unnecessary to separate unencoded (e.g., binary) String support into
String and ByteArray.

Please don't try to assume that the problem is this completley
unnecessary division. The problem is that existing strings are
completely unencoded and have no way of being flagged with an encoding
that is supported in any way across all of Ruby.

People are making really *stupid* assumptions based on what choices
other development teams have made, and it's irritating.

Ruby does not need a String with an internal representation in Unicode;
Ruby does not need a separate byte vector. An unencoded string can be
treated as a byte vector with no problems; if it is determined to have
textual meaning, it can be tagged with an encoding very simply and from
that point be treated as a meaningful string. There are times when the
encoding is *not* best treated in Unicode, especially if there are
potential conversion errors.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue / gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/
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