Leslie Viljoen wrote:
> On 8/4/06, Logan Capaldo <logancapaldo / gmail.com> wrote:
>> .
>> >
>> > On an unrelated note, I think I discovered a bug in 1.9:
>> >
>> > ?q => 'q' # should be 113, right?
>> >
>> > Regards,
>> >
>> That's not a bug, it's a feature! Ruby 1.9 is on the path to 2.0
>> which gets rid of the whole 1 byte == 1 character thing.
>
> I cannot tell you how annoying it is to work with binary data strings
> in C# when everything is unicode. Can the new Ruby support old 1byte =
> 1character strings as well?
>
>
> Les
>
>
Or do what Perl did: have "byte semantics" and "character semantics" and 
have a "pragma" that allows switching between the two. I forget whether 
Perl does it at "compile" time or run time ... for Ruby, run time would 
be the obvious choice, I think.

This bit me once on Perl. I had a program with a byte constant and a 
Perl upgrade broke a comparison for equality when the default switched 
from byte semantics to character semantics. Bah!