From: "Eregon (Benoit Daloze) via ruby-core" <ruby-core@...>
Date: 2023-12-06T12:36:12+00:00
Subject: [ruby-core:115604] [Ruby master Feature#18576] Rename `ASCII-8BIT` encoding to `BINARY`

Issue #18576 has been updated by Eregon (Benoit Daloze).



Target version set to 3.4



@matz Could we try this again for 3.4, soon after the 3.3 release?



Then there is plenty of time to discover any issue related to it (probably very few as gems have been patched, and applications using encoding names instead of encoding constants are likely very old and unlikely to use a recent Ruby).



----------------------------------------

Feature #18576: Rename `ASCII-8BIT` encoding to `BINARY`

https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18576#change-105535



* Author: byroot (Jean Boussier)

* Status: Open

* Priority: Normal

* Target version: 3.4

----------------------------------------

### Context



I'm now used to it, but something that confused me for years was errors such as:



```ruby

>> "f�e" + "\xFF".b

(irb):3:in `+': incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT (Encoding::CompatibilityError)

```



When you aren't that familiar with Ruby, it's really not evident that `ASCII-8BIT` basically means "no encoding" or "binary".



And even when you know it, if you don't read carefully it's very easily confused with `US-ASCII`.



The `Encoding::BINARY` alias is much more telling IMHO.



### Proposal



Since `Encoding::ASCII_8BIT` has been aliased as `Encoding::BINARY` for years, I think renaming it to `BINARY` and then making asking `ASCII_8BIT` the alias would significantly improve usability without backward compatibility concerns.



The only concern I could see would be the consistency with a handful of C API functions:



  - `rb_encoding *rb_ascii8bit_encoding(void)`

  - `int rb_ascii8bit_encindex(void)`

  - `VALUE rb_io_ascii8bit_binmode(VALUE io)`



But that's for much more advanced users, so I don't think it's much of a concern.









-- 

https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/

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