From: Michal Suchanek <hramrach@...>
Date: 2009-02-19T19:55:12+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:22254] Re: [Feature #908] Should be an easy way of 	reading N characters from am I/O stream

2009/2/19 Tanaka Akira <akr@fsij.org>:
> In article <op.upklh9q19245dp@kool>,
>  "Michael Selig" <michael.selig@fs.com.au> writes:

>> Also it seems to me that the current usage of the "limit" parameter of
>> IO#gets is not intuitive in 1.9. It is "maximum number of bytes, but don't
>> split a character", and I think it should be changed to mean "maximum
>> number of chars". That would be much more obvious, more useful (IMHO), and
>> still be backward compatible with 1.8.
>
> It is introduced for security reason.  bytes are more stable
> than characters.
>

However, the security would be served as well by a character limit.

As I understand it this limit is introduced so that a gets does not
read several gigabytes of data at once in case there is no line
separator.

Thanks

Michal