From: Logan Capaldo <logancapaldo@...>
Date: 2006-06-26T14:50:50+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?


On Jun 26, 2006, at 1:24 AM, Daniel DeLorme wrote:

> I think the real issue is not technical but rather a problem of  
> perception and education. Ever since C-style strings, programmers  
> have learned to view a string as an array of chars. So when we need  
> to do char-string manipulation, we resort to pointer arithmetic  
> when it fact the "correct" and ruby-native way of manipulating  
> strings is with regular expressions. Instead of giving in to this  
> old string-as-array mentality, maybe we should teach people to use  
> regular expressions? Hmmm, probably impossible.

Regular expressions are a very powerful tool, but they do not  
describe the entire set of operations one would reasonably want to  
perform on a string. Or perhaps they do but in a needlessly complex  
way. I want to get the first letter (character?) of a sentence, in  
pure regexp terms I'd do this: str.match(/\A./)[0] It's needlessly  
cryptic. Note that I'm not trying to make a commentary on whether or  
not character string/byte string should be separate, just trying to  
point out that "use regular expressions" shouldn't always be the answer.