From: Dave Thomas <dave@...>
Date: 2008-12-12T03:34:38+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:20486] Re: encoding of symbols


On Dec 11, 2008, at 11:38 AM, Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:

>> I was surprised to see that a has US-ASCII encoding. Now that  
>> strings and symbols are converging, shouldn't both a and b be  
>> encoded UTF-8, so that symbols and strings behave the same way?
>
> Strings and symbols are converging?

:cat[2] => "t"

So the interpreter implies that symbols have a string representation  
(as opposed, for example, to an object id representation, in which  
case an aref would return a bit, as it does for fixnums).

And if indexing into a symbol returns a string, then I'd expect the  
same encoding rules to apply to the symbol as to the string.

Right now, we have the strange situation that

   "cat".to_sym.to_s.encoding != "cat".encoding


Dave