On Monday, August 18, 2003, 11:03:50 PM, Yukihiro wrote:

> Hi,

> In message "Question: immutable strings as design goal?"
>     on 03/08/18, Gavin Sinclair <gsinclair / soyabean.com.au> writes:

> |Today I saw a blog by Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, on
> |www.artima.com in which he criticized Ruby's mutable strings - saying
> |that of such a horror he could ne'er conceive, or something :)

> If mutable strings are horror, mutable dictionaries should be as well.
> The one with such standard should go to side-effect free language like
> Haskell. ;-)

Yes, that thought struck me as well.

> I rarely have such problems caused by mutable strings.  Besides, Ruby
> is not a language to keep people away from horror.  You can write
> ugly, scary, or dangerous programs in Ruby, if you want.  It's cost
> for freedom.

I don't think his thoughts were on freedon vs restrictions.  It seemed
that he just thinks strings, for whatever reason, *should* be
immutable, like numbers.

As a counter-point, all the freedom in the Ruby world doesn't allow
you to modify symbols.  Guido obviously believes that all strings
should be like that.  (And dictionaries, obviously, shouldn't.)

Gavin