From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2005-03-24T05:34:54+09:00
Subject: Re: Iterating through a string and removing leading characters

Randy Kramer wrote:

> Thanks, but I'm still confused--s1 is "This is a test", so 211 is neither nil 
> nor ASCII for "i", and besides, I asked for the (object_)id.  
> 
> 211 does happen to be 2*?i+1--maybe there's a clue there? (and the same thing 
> holds for the previous character (h) which shows up as 209)

irb(main):001:0> ?i.id
(irb):1: warning: Object#id will be deprecated; use Object#object_id
=> 211

This is consistent with the explanation from my earlier posting:

'So "foo"[0] == ?f. And the object_id of low Fixnums is usually very low 
as their value is directly stored in it.'

> My original concern: I was hoping that s1[0] and similar did not create new 
> objects, and I suspect they don't, but I'm not sure.

Fixnums are never created (they are only referred to) so this does not 
cause any object creation overhead.