From: Unknown <borg@...3.net>
Date: 2007-02-09T21:46:59+09:00
Subject: Re: String.ord



On Fri, 9 Feb 2007, Steven Lumos wrote:

> There must be some kind of impedance mismatch going on here.  Is
> somebody really arguing that maybe it should NOT be possible to read
> binary data into a String and process individual bytes efficiently?
>
> Use cases?
>
>  - any kind of image processing
>  - implementing maybe half of all Internet protocols
>  - data compression
>  - error correction
>  - encryption
>  - Efficient XML Interchange [1]
>
> Stop thinking of strings like 'hello world' and start thinking of
> strings like TCP headers.  If anyone wants to argue that it should be
> arbitrarily impossible / inefficient / inconvenient to implement TCP
> in Ruby then I think the burden of proof should be on them.
>
> Maybe you mean to argue that String should not be used for non-textual
> data, even though it always has been before.  In that case maybe we
> need something like NArray in core.  (In core, not ext, please.)
>
> Steve
>
> [1] In fact, see http://www.w3.org/TR/xbc-use-cases/ for a whole
> stack of use cases.
>

I dont belive you ever used String class (C++) for Bitmap 
processing or TCP headers parsing. For Bitmap you usualy
have char pic[n] and for TCP some kind of struct.
Maybe indeed Ruby needs some kind of native char array class.