Marnen Laibow-Koser wrote:
> Binary data doesn't belong in Strings.  Period.

And Ruby doesn't provide any other suitable data type. At least, IO#read 
and #write only operate with Strings.

Python 3 is going down the route of two different data types: one for 
binary data, one for character data. Erlang similarly has "binaries" but 
also list of integers (if you want a list of codepoints)

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