From: Mohit Sindhwani <mo_mail@...>
Date: 2007-08-31T13:13:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby stupidities

Kenneth McDonald wrote:
> The title is intentionally (but semiseriously) contentious, but I'm 
> not trying to say that Ruby is a bad language--I'm using it, right :-) 
> ? However, any language has its unfortunate share of bad APIs, design 
> decisions, etc., and Ruby is no exception. I've stumbled across a few, 
> and thought it might be useful to start up a thread discussing what 
> people view as Ruby's stupidities. Why? Because it's a lot less 
> painful to find out about them by reading them than be tracking 
> obscure errors in one's code.
>
> In order to keep this on a not-completely-shouting-match level, I 
> think it's fair to give a reason something you mention as a Ruby 
> Stupidity is in fact stupid. For example, it violates common sense, it 
> causes more trouble than it's worth, etc. etc., and to discuss what a 
> better way of implementing such a feature might be.
>
> Having said that, here's my first entry. I think it's utterly stupid 
> (can you tell I just wasted some time tracking this down?) that
>
>    "abc"[0] == "a"
>
> is false. Why doesn't that work? Because, with a single index, the 
> array access operator on a string returns, not the character at the 
> given position, but the _character code_ of the character at that 
> position.

I admit that I've faced this one before :)

Cheers,
Mohit.
8/31/2007 | 12:13 PM.