From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2002-07-06T03:31:01+09:00
Subject: Re: is there a better string.each?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Campbell" <michael_s_campbell@yahoo.com>
To: "ruby-talk ML" <ruby-talk@ruby-lang.org>
Sent: Friday, July 05, 2002 11:07 AM
Subject: Re: is there a better string.each?


> > This is something which bites everybody, I think, at some point.
> 
> Not to be a pedant, but this seems like a huge breakage of the POLS,
> if it bites everyone, no?   =)

I see your point, but I disagree.

If Ruby behaved identically to C, then the
surprise for C programmers would be precisely
zero.

But when you use C for string processing (especially
when you've used something more powerful), you find 
yourself saying: "There should be some easy way to
do THIS..."

In the first place, POLS is a Matz-centric phenomenon
(as he has admitted). The more you think like Matz,
the better you will understand Ruby.

Secondly, POLS should be a meta-linguistic issue IMO --
not "how does this work in my favorite language?" but
"how *should* this work in an ideal universe?"

And I think Strings are not really Arrays. There are
some isomorphisms there, since they are both "ordered
collections of entities."

But a string is a highly specialized thing. For one
thing, each item has to be a character. No other 
Ruby array is limited in the kind of data it can
contain; such an idea seems very unRubylike to me.

No, I have to say that in this respect as in others,
Ruby corrected C's mistake. And it was not really
and truly a mistake in C; C is close to assembly
language, and is not as high level as Ruby. There
was not really another way to think of strings 
except as arrays. But we're past that now.

Hal Fulton