From: "Michael W. Ryder" <_mwryder@...>
Date: 2007-04-24T17:35:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Question regarding design of the String Class

Lee wrote:
> You know, you can always type:
> 
> s = 'Hello World'
> puts s[1,s.length - 1]
> 
> Maybe that's a bit wordy for you?  I think Ruby's use of [] really
> follows convention that you are accessing an index.  That is what most
> programmers think of when they see [].  If you provide a single
> Fixnum, one would expect you would get back the contents of that
> index, and since strings are arrays of characters, that is what you
> are indeed getting back.
> 

If I were getting back a character or string I would not have a problem. 
  The problem is that every other use of [] in the string class returns 
a string or nil, this one returns an integer.  I was curious if this was 
necessary for some other part of the language or just an "accident".