From: Izidor Jerebic <ij.rubylist@...>
Date: 2006-06-29T03:39:54+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode roadmap?


On 28.6.2006, at 18:48, Austin Ziegler wrote:

>> About (2), inability to tell in advance in your program whether you
>> get bytes or characters from a method in core (or any other) API is
>> NOT a good thing. This causes innumerable problems and unexpected
>> behaviour if programmer expects one and code sometimes gets the
>> other. The API should prevent such errors, either by very simple and
>> strict rules that enable easy prediction, or by introducing
>> ByteArray, which makes prediction trivial. This is not about duck-
>> typing, it's about randomly having semantically different results.
>
> You'll *never* get that without type hinting.

I think you do not understand what the problem is, because your claim  
is so obviously false.

How can I get that with very simple rule: all IO#read (and similar)  
calls always return binary Strings.

No type hinting in sight, but I always know whether my code receives  
Strings or binary Strings. But this simple option is clearly not  
possible, because it complicates the text processing in simple  
scripts. We'll see how complicated the final rules will be.

Alternative (actually equivalent) to the above is: all IO#readbytes  
calls return ByteArray objects, and we need separate call  
IO#readstring which always return Strings with encoding.


izidor