On 8 February 2010 22:00, Seebs <usenet-nospam / seebs.net> wrote: > On 2010-02-08, Brian Candler <b.candler / pobox.com> wrote: >> It's as complex as hell. I took the trouble to document about 200 >> behaviours of String in 1.9, and I still haven't really scratched the >> surface. http://github.com/candlerb/string19/blob/master/string19.rb > > Ahh. > >> The scariest bit for me is that a simple expression like >> >> a = b + c >> >> (where b and c are both Strings) can raise exceptions. Writing your >> program so that you can be *sure* it won't raise an exception is hard. > > I'd rather get an exception than silently get incoherent output, though. > >> I don't want to have to expend effort working around artefacts of the >> language, especially when dealing with binary data. > > To some extent, I agree, but I was under the impression that you could > address this by specifying a desired encoding. Unless you forget ;-) Thanks Michal