From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2002-01-22T09:37:41+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby binary handling

Hi,

In message "Re: ruby binary handling"
    on 02/01/22, Niko Schwarz <niko.schwarz@gmx.net> writes:

|We have two problems here, imho:
|a) characters should be all general, i.e. not just ascii or unicode but 
|being subclassable to all the existing keycodes.
|that, in turn, would require a completely different string->character 
|translation, because the char-code depends on the charset.

This one is achieved by Ruby M17N; not by subclassing though.

  string.encoding = "binary"
  # sting works like binary
  string.encoding = "utf-8"
  # sting works like utf-8

And where's another problem?

|in any way, there should be two different classes for strings and binary 
|data, for a few reasons:
|- binary data doesnt need methods like capitalize!
|- string data doesnt need methods like xor

I guess it's OK to have redundant methods if you can tell it's an error.

|- for string data its not certain at all that one character will consist of 
|one byte.

It's done by M17N.

|so, summed up, my ideas would be:
|- a common superclass for strings and binaries
|- different intern handling of those, depending on the size and the type 
|theyre used

The latter is an interesting idea.  Could you tell me more?

							matz.