From: Martin Duerst <duerst@...>
Date: 2008-12-14T16:48:00+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:20547] Re: encoding of symbols

At 20:33 08/12/13, Charles Oliver Nutter wrote:
>Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
>> 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.
>
>Very good point; symbols are not necessarily created in the file where you use their literal form, and therefore need to have a single encoding everywhere. I concur.

Please note that as far as I understand, ASCII-only symbols will be
in <Encoding:US-ASCII> and will therefore match across files with
different non-ASCII encodings, but symbols including non_ascii characters
will be in different encodings, and therefore won't match between
files of different encodings.

Regards,    Martin.



#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp