On Jun 25, 2006, at 6:11 PM, Austin Ziegler wrote:

> Under the people who want separate ByteVector and String class, I'll
> need *two* APIs:
>
>  st = File.open("file.txt", "rb") { |f| f.read_string }
>  bv = File.open("file.txt", "rb") { |f| f.read_bytes }

Maybe I'm missing something, but in today's networked heterogeneous  
environment, that first call looks deeply dangerous to me.  I don't  
see how you can expect to get a String out of a file in the general  
case.  Files contain bytes, strings contain characters, and  
pretending you can get from one to the other without explicit  
encoding specification or inference is unsound.

Pardon me if I'm missing something obvious. -Tim