From: Brian Candler <b.candler@...>
Date: 2009-08-12T18:18:00+09:00
Subject: Re: 1.9 String and M17N documentation

BTW, I find James's writeup of what he had to do to the CSV library (*) 
enlightening. Even ruby 1.9 won't match an ASCII regexp like /,/ against 
a wide encoding, so he had to generate new regexps dynamically at 
runtime.

Now, I think that's a good thing, optimising the regexps to match the 
incoming data stream efficiently. But I also observe that this would 
have worked just fine if the encoding were a property of the regexp only 
- which is the approach 1.8 takes to regexps. What I mean is, once you 
have decided to build a "UTF-16LE" regexp, say, you can just match it 
against a stream of bytes.

Making every single String also have an encoding property only gives 
more opportunities for Ruby to raise exceptions. Some may argue this is 
Ruby "protecting" you from doing something silly, but if I'm working 
with string literals or binary data returned from a library, whose 
encoding may or may not have been set to ASCII-8BIT, then I don't want 
this "protection". Rather, I need protecting against ruby 1.9.

There is only one case I can see where having the encoding be a property 
of the String itself is useful: selecting individual characters by 
index. e.g.

   if str.size > 50
     str = str[0,47] + "..."
   end

There's a huge amount of language pain introduced just for that.

Regards,

Brian.

(*) http://blog.grayproductions.net/articles/what_ruby_19_gives_us
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