From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju@...>
Date: 2005-07-04T07:05:48+09:00
Subject: Re: O(1) performance for insertions/deletions at the front of an Array/String

On Sun, 3 Jul 2005, Eric Mahurin wrote:

> > Part of Matz's plan for Ruby 2 is to make String and Array
> > less consistent with each other.
> What is the reason behind this?  I don't get it.  Do you have a
> link to the reasoning?

read "The Face Of Unicode Support in the Future":

  http://www.ruby-talk.org/ruby/ruby-core/4001-4200.shtml
  http://www.ruby-talk.org/ruby/ruby-core/4201-4400.shtml

> If Array/String were too different, I'd have to double these classes to
> get the functionality that I can get now.

I know, I know...

> There are many other places that I use these commonalities.
> I use duck-typing quite a bit to have methods/classes handle both Array
> and String.

Alot of people are using those commonalities. I went as far as extracting
a common subclass out of my emulation of the Array class and my emulation
of the String class.

> BTW, I don't have all of the above implemented yet.  And I may have
> other implementations that may use the commonality of Array/String (i.e.
> linked list of fixed sized buffers).

I guess that if you want to do that with Ruby 2, you should instead use
Arrays everywhere, and replace Strings by Arrays of ascii/unicode codes. 
When you have to deal with real Strings, convert.

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