On 26.6.2006, at 22:46, Austin Ziegler wrote:

> This would probably be an unencoded String. If you want an encoded
> String, you would specify it on the File object either during
> construction or afterwards.

This seems too good to be true :-)

How will e.g. Japanese (or we non-English Europeans), which now use  
default $KCODE, write their Ruby scripts? Will we need to specify  
encoding in every script for every IO? This can get cumbersome very  
fast. Not really Ruby style.

But if there will be some default encoding, it will interfere with  
said rules about return values. And that may cause errors when I run  
script meant for some other default encoding.

This problem makes me think that rules won't be so simple as  
described now (actually, Matz said that this detail is not fixed yet).

We'll see. I have just voiced my concerns about separation between  
bytes and characters. Must wait for the master to present solution  
(and hope he considers these problems)...


izidor