From: "jballanc (Joshua Ballanco)" Date: 2012-04-27T01:52:56+09:00 Subject: [ruby-core:44655] [ruby-trunk - Feature #6361] Bitwise string operations Issue #6361 has been updated by jballanc (Joshua Ballanco). +1 for Blob (or, my preferred name: Data). I've mentioned this in the past, but we can look at Obj-C's example: NSString => a string class with encoding and code-point/character-wise manipulation, NSData => a class to encapsulate a random array of bytes. ---------------------------------------- Feature #6361: Bitwise string operations https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/6361#change-26222 Author: MartinBosslet (Martin Bosslet) Status: Feedback Priority: Normal Assignee: Category: core Target version: I know this has been discussed a lot in the past (and if there's still an open issue for this, I apologize, I couldn't find one), for example in [1]. While it is generally no problem to implement this on the fly, I still find that built-in support would be a real improvement. There are quite some use cases in cryptography where this would come in very handy, but I'm sure there are lots of other areas, too. While of course I understand the reasons that were given in the previous threads that ultimately lead to rejection, I still would like to reopen the discussion as I felt that in every thread so far the consensus was that having bitwise string operations would indeed be quite valuable. [1] http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-core/34586 -- http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/