[ruby-core:44864] [ruby-trunk - Feature #6361] Bitwise string operations

Issue #6361 has been updated by jballanc (Joshua Ballanco).


Just throwing this out there, but a new class could be introduced first, then used as a replacement for Pack/IO/etc. in a later version (to allay breaking change concerns).

I understand the desire to simply work on an array of bits, but I think your sieve example is a little too simplistic. Are you never going to pass this string holding bits to another method? Are you never going to concatenate it with another string? If the answer is yes, then your solution would work. However, if there is ever the chance that someone might call #encode or #<< on your string, then the current Ruby string implementation is insufficient for working with bits.
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Feature #6361: Bitwise string operations
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/6361#change-26437

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


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