From: Markus <markus@...>
Date: 2004-10-25T23:44:05+09:00
Subject: Re: [rcr] String#first / String#last

On Mon, 2004-10-25 at 07:25, trans. (T. Onoma) wrote:
> On Monday 25 October 2004 09:49 am, Robert Klemme wrote:
> | Yeah possibly.  Another problem with each_byte is that byte != char for
> | many encodings.  But AFAIK #each_byte and #split(//) share this problem.
> |
> | I believe a drawback of using "foo".split(//) is that it's less
> | performant: you need to create the tmp array plus all the string instances
> | (although they share the buffer AFAIK).
> 
> I think this is a very interesting point. I wonder how Ruby 2 will progress in 
> the area. Isn't i18N (not that I really know what that entails) on the map? 
> How does that effect things. Is it then prudent to create an actual Character 
> class, such that a String is essentially an Array of Characters? (not to say 
> there won't be differences between Array and String, but in essence)

     I would like that.  Characters are an interesting class in there
own right--and they are _not_ bytes.  Strings are much more like arrays
of Characters than Characters are like Integers, so that would be a much
cleaner way to go.

     *smile*  We could also resolve the discrepancies by deprecating
strings in favor of Bignums, which I suspect Kurt G旦del would like, if
no one else.

-- Markus