On 27.6.2006, at 19:19, Austin Ziegler wrote:

> As I said, most of my opposition is based on
> (1) stupid statically typed languages and (2) an inability to tell
> Ruby what type you want back from a method call (this is a good thing,
> because it in part prevents #1 ;).

First, "most of my opposition" is not useful in discussion and is a  
straw-man, because we are not counting people here, we try to  
evaluate reasons for and against. One person with good reason should  
overcome 1000 not-so-good posts. This is not about winning the  
argument, it's about having the best solution.

About (2), inability to tell in advance in your program whether you  
get bytes or characters from a method in core (or any other) API is  
NOT a good thing. This causes innumerable problems and unexpected  
behaviour if programmer expects one and code sometimes gets the  
other. The API should prevent such errors, either by very simple and  
strict rules that enable easy prediction, or by introducing  
ByteArray, which makes prediction trivial. This is not about duck- 
typing, it's about randomly having semantically different results.

Since the rules are not fixed yet, nobody can say whether one or the  
other solution is better. But if the API is not very clear or  
requires lots of manual specifying in code, we will be in a mess,  
similar to today.


izidor