[ruby-core:18617] IO limit - bytes or characters?

Hi,

Before getting to the main subject, there is a minor issue with the doc on  
IO#readbyte. I think it should say:
	"Reads a byte as with <code>IO#getbyte</code>"

Several methods in IO take an option "limit" - gets/each_line etc. I  
thought, because these methods are based on a "line", that "limit" would  
be "maximum number of characters". However, it seems to be bytes, but it  
seems to be rounded up to the nearest whole character. At least it doesn't  
seem to split up multi-byte characters. Is this the intended behaviour?

The documentation is rather vague: "the returning string would not be  
longer than the given value", but this sounds like it means number of  
characters. So may I suggest that either the behaviour be changed to mean  
"number of characters" (preferable), or the documentation explain what it  
does on multi-byte character encodings.

This is low priority - I have never used the "limit" parameter myself, and  
I am not exactly sure what its use is, unless perhaps you expect very long  
lines in your input.

Cheers
Mike