From: Leslie Viljoen <leslieviljoen@...>
Date: 2006-06-15T03:56:05+09:00
Subject: Re: A plan for another unicode string hack

On 6/14/06, Dae San Hwang <daesan@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jun 14, 2006, at 11:56 PM, Logan Capaldo wrote:
>
> >
> > On Jun 14, 2006, at 10:47 AM, Dae San Hwang wrote:
> >
> >> The reason I'm differentiating between 'size' and 'length' is
> >> because some libraries (like rails) depend on them returning the
> >> byte size of the string. Maybe we can establish a customs that
> >> 'size' for byte size and 'length' for the number of characters.
> >> Same reasoning goes for '[]' and 'slice'.
> >
> > I like these very much. Although the choice between [] and slice
> > seem arbitrary (i.e. you could have swapped their meanings and it
> > would have made just as much sense). #size vs. #length is perfect.
> > and #[] being a Fixnum when their was no encoding but a character
> > when there is is equally brilliant. I salute you sir!
> >
>
> Thanks for the kind words.
>
> The reason I picked [] for encoding aware method is because String#
> [index] will be used to extract the letter and not the byte in Ruby
> 2.0 as mentioned in http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/
> futurismUnicodeInRuby.html
>
>    so that "abc"[0] returns "a" instead of fixnum 97

This behaviour - of [] returning different values depending on the
argument has always made me a bit crazy. Does anyone know why it was
done that way?