From: Dave Burt <dave@...>
Date: 2006-06-15T16:33:07+09:00
Subject: Re: A plan for another unicode string hack

Leslie Viljoen wrote:
> On 6/14/06, Leslie Viljoen <leslieviljoen@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 6/14/06, Dae San Hwang <daesan@gmail.com> wrote:
>> >    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?
> 
> ..returning different *type* values I mean..

I've heard it's due to be fixed by end of next year.

Now, to Ruby's strings, a character is a byte, represented by a Fixnum.

The new Ruby character will be a string:

?c  #=> "c"
"c"[0]  #=> "c"
"c"[0].ord  #=> 99

Cheers,
Dave