[ruby-core:30376] Re: suggestion: switch default name for BINARY encoding

(2010/05/22 9:13), Roger Pack wrote:
>>> Currently the encoding ASCII-8BIT "means" ascii and binary.
>>
>> No. ASCII-8BIT means ASCII compatible 8bit string; it has 256 characters.
>
> I believe it actually means two things, depending on context, no?

No.

>> No. ASCII-8BIT is not a default in Ruby.
>> You may confused by the fact that rb_str_new returns ASCII-8BIT string
>> and old extension library returns such strings.
>
> BINARY is the default, when you pass an encoding of nil...seems like
> it's the default..

It is removed.

> "a".force_encoding(nil)
TypeError: can't convert nil into String
         from (irb):1:in `force_encoding'
         from (irb):1
         from /home/naruse/local/ruby-trunk/bin/irb:12:in `<main>'

> Apparently BINARY means "unencoded bytes" which happens to be the same
> encoding as ASCII-8BIT

No.

>>> Beginners have no idea what ASCII-8BIT means.  But they do understand
>>> BINARY.
>>
>> ASCII-8BIT is different from the thing people will imagine by the name
>> "BINARY",
>> even if it aliased as BINARY.
>
> Good point, actually.  I take back my suggestion.
>
> However it is a bit confusing to have binary data (File.binread 'x')
> and have it come back to you as ASCII-8BIT.  A jpeg image, for
> example, is *not really* ASCII-8BIT.  It happens to have the same
> encoding, however.

No, it is ASCII-8BIT.
This is why you can data.include?("JFIF").

> ...
>> The name "BINARY" can't express it is ASCII-compatible.
>
> I think that the ambiguity is that "ASCII-8BIT" typically means "just
> some data--it might be a string, it might be binary" so it's hard to
> have a good name for its encoding.
>
> Maybe we can call it ASCII-8BIT-BINARY? Or maybe UNKNOWN or
> UNSPECIFIED or something...
>
> I'd be ok with that.  We could alias the others...

Why you want to give simple but misleading name?
I want developers to read document when they meet ASCII-8BIT.

-- 
NARUSE, Yui  <[e-mail]>