From: Leslie Viljoen <leslieviljoen@...>
Date: 2006-06-15T17:08:41+09:00
Subject: Re: A plan for another unicode string hack

On 6/15/06, Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@path.berkeley.edu> wrote:
> 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.

I agree with Austin on this - the distinction is too vague. I'd leave
length and size the same and make a size_in_bytes method.

Les