From: Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@...>
Date: 2008-12-12T09:32:16+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:20496] Re: encoding of symbols

Hi,

In message "Re: [ruby-core:20494] Re: encoding of symbols"
    on Fri, 12 Dec 2008 08:45:03 +0900, Yukihiro Matsumoto <matz@ruby-lang.org> writes:

||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?
|
|You are right about encoding of the symbols.  I will fix, unless there's
|any reason I forget right now.

It was very easy to implement it, but when I tried, I found different
inconsistency, which is:

  # encoding: utf-8
  p :a.encoding  # => #<Encoding:UTF-8>
  p :p.encoding  # => #<Encoding:US-ASCII>

means a symbol would have an encoding of which the symbol first
appears, in this case symbol :a first appears on a file with UTF-8
encoding, whereas :p appears first for a name to built-in method.

So rather making symbols to have somewhat unpredictable encoding, I'd
rather keep them as they are now, despite the inconsistency with
string encoding.

							matz.