From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2000-01-04T03:30:32+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:01037] Re: Is this a bug?

Hi,

In message "[ruby-talk:01026] Is this a bug?"
    on 00/01/03, Dave Thomas <Dave@thomases.com> writes:

|Given the following:
|
|       � = 1 
|       print �, "\n"
|
|(where the variable is an 'a' with a grave accent), I get
|
|       /tc/dave/play/line.rb:2: undefined method `�,'
|            for #<Object:0x40197ed4> (NameError)
|
|Comment out the 'print'line, and it runs.
|
|I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but why is '�' treated
|differently in the two lines?

Because I have no knowledge about iso-8859-1, non ascii characters
are not treated as usual characters in Ruby.  Identifiers must be in

  [A-Za-z_][A-Za-z_0-9]*

The reason it seemed to work partly is Ruby confused it as EUC
(Extended Unix Code, encoding for Japanese multibyte character
string).  If you put -Kn option to the interpreter, it reports as it
should.  I think it's better to do

  ./configure --with-default-kcode=none

at your compile time.  Maybe it should be default.  I'll do it for
next release.

Oh, and could you tell me any idea about treating iso-8859-1
characters in single byte mode (with -Kn)?

							matz.