From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2008-09-19T00:48:48+09:00
Subject: Re: get a portion of a utf8 encoded string

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 9:36 PM, Peña, Botp <botp@delmonte-phil.com>

> cmon, greg, what could be better than
>
>  'hällo'[0, 2]
>
> ?
>
> the change is good.

The change is absolutely good!  I did a training session at  Lone Star
Ruby Conference that sung its praises.

What isn't good is to say "I've not yet updated my code for Ruby 1.9",
so it works on Ruby 1.8.7 only.

My point is that if people really want to use Ruby 1.9 features for
anything but experimentation, they'd do more good by actually using
1.9, not an intermediate release that left most people confused.

If you are writing Ruby 1.8.7 specific code, your code may not run on
Ruby 1.9, for example, the code above will blow up on 1.9 unless the
encoding is properly set.

And your code *definitely* won't work on Ruby 1.8.x aside from 1.8.7

So if you're okay locking to a single point release, that's fine.  But
I think it'd help ruby-core a lot more for you to use Ruby 1.9 and
help them iron out issues, and it'd help the Ruby community a lot more
for you to choose whether you are supporting 1.8.x, 1.9.x or both, but
not something that is neither (1.8.7)


-greg



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