From: "Michael W. Ryder" <_mwryder@...>
Date: 2007-04-23T11:35:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Question regarding design of the String Class

Roland Crosby wrote:
> On Apr 22, 2007, at 10:00 PM, Michael W. Ryder wrote:
> 
>> Was there a reason the string class was implemented with str[i] 
>> returning the code of position i in str?  The reason I ask this is 
>> that in other languages str[i] returns the string starting at position 
>> i. For example C uses t = strcpy(str[i]) and Business Basic uses 
>> S$=T$(I) to copy a string from position i.
>> I can see no way to do this in Ruby other than using something like: t 
>> = str[i,9999].  It seemed strange that copying ranges of strings uses 
>> the same format as C (t =strncpy(str[i],n)) but not when copying the 
>> remainder.
> 
> Try str[i,-1], or one of the myriad other ways to access ranges of a 
> string as defined in String#[]
> 
If I enter:
	a = "This is a test."
	b = a[1, -1]
	puts b
irb returns nil.  Obviously this is not what I want.  If instead of -1 I 
use 9999 it returns "his a test." which is what I was looking for.  This 
seems like a kludge and an inconsistency.  Like I pointed out other 
languages just use b = a[1] to get the remainder of the string instead 
of 104.  The string class already has methods like each_byte for 
converting characters in a string to a number, so why does it need 
another shortcut for something that is probably very rarely used.