On Aug 4, 2006, at 8:58 AM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:

> 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!

What do you do when you need both semantics in the same program?

James Edward Gray II