Re: O(1) performance for insertions/deletions at the front of an Array/String

Eric Mahurin wrote:

> The main difference I saw was that a character would be
> represented as String rather than a Fixnum.  I'd rather see it
> remain an Integer to handle the unicode encodings - Fixnum when
> that is enough and Bignum where needed.  That would give better
> compatibility.  And efficiency when dealing with encodings that
> fit in a Fixnum.
> 
> I'm not quite sure, but with this change, I think my stuff
> would still be fine.  You'd just have to think of a String as
> an Array of Strings instead of an Array of Fixnums.

I think so as well. This won't be much of a problem until you depend on 
a String consisting of Fixnums.

I think ?a will also be changed so that "foobar"[-2] == ?a will remain true.

You might even still get an immediate value from the above and I think 
it will not have to be a string itself. There might be a new character 
class, for all I know.