On Sunday 03 November 2002 6:12 am, Gavin Sinclair wrote:
> From: "Albert Wagner" <alwagner / tcac.net>
>
> > > [Enric:]
> > > Why are Strings arrays of integers ? aString[0] is an integer, yes,
> > > it's the way it is, but I would like to have String as an array of
> > > chars, and char if you want as a descendant of Integer (nice election
> > > because a Unicode String is and array of double chars i.e. integer), I
> > > don't know you, but for me aString[i].chr =='x' is somewhat unnatural,
> > > because it breaks the semantic of a String, so it's not intuitive for
> > > me.
> >
> > It is not intuitive to many people.  There have been long discussions on
> > the pros and cons.
>
> It's probably not intuitive to *anybody* (except perhaps Matz).  However, I
> see no particular justification for it being any other way, and in fact
> it's changing in 1.7 isn't it?  Anyway, my point is: you'll never forget it
> now. And if you're like me, you won't care either.
>
> But to nitpick, a String is *not* an array of integers.  It is a String :)
>
> Other options, if you're testing equality of an individual character:
>
>   string[i] == ?x
>   string[i,1] == "x"

So that no one misunderstand my comments about Smalltalk.  I don't mean to 
imply that I think Ruby is flawed to the extent that it is not Smalltalk.  I 
am quite pragmatic about  languages:  I dislike intensely the image aspects 
of Smalltalk. I very much like "require", "include", et al in Ruby. 

>
> Cheers,
> Gavin

-- 
"I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can 
tell you I did not have C++ in mind."
                                            -Alan Kay