From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2006-06-15T13:52:25+09:00
Subject: Re: A plan for another unicode string hack

Dave Howell wrote:
> 
> On Jun 14, 2006, at 9:17, Austin Ziegler wrote:
> 
> Yes, I undertstand. Making #size and #length return different values
> is a mistake. Without referring to documentation, how would you know
> which returns the number of characters and  which one returns the
> number of bytes?
> 
> I cannot agree. "Length" (to me) unavoidably implies that it's the
> answer to the question "How LONG is it?" I expect the answer to be "n
> characters long."
> 
> "Size" is the answer to "How BIG is it?" as in "How much space does this
> thing take up?" and if it's a UTF-8 string, I expect an answer like "1
> byte per character + one more byte per character not in the 7-bit ASCII
> range"

That's not a bad argument, but Hash#size and Array#size don't behave
that way in ruby.

-- 
      vjoel : Joel VanderWerf : path berkeley edu : 510 665 3407