From: Eric Mahurin <eric.mahurin@...>
Date: 2005-10-31T06:33:47+09:00
Subject: characters (and small strings) in ruby 2.0

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In ruby 2.0, the current plan is to for a character to be represented as a
String instead of an Integer. I'm writing a parser/lexer and I think not
representing characters as immediate objects could be a significant
performance penalty. Could I suggest something? How about a character be
represented as frozen/immutable string and give very small (maybe up to 3
8-bit chars for 32-bit and 7 8-bit chars for 64-bit) immutable/frozen
strings an immediate class (like a small Integer is a Fixnum)? So for most
character encodings any character could be an immediate, but when necessary
a normal String-like (frozen or immutable) object is used to encode the
character (like Bignum's are used when you go over the Fixnum limit).

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