Issue #18576 has been updated by Eregon (Benoit Daloze). I think everyone's opinion on the thread is pretty clear and not everyone agrees, that's fine. @matz Could you decide whether it's OK to experiment with the Encoding#name changing to "BINARY" or not? If not, is @byroot's proposal in https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18576#note-33 accepted? ---------------------------------------- Feature #18576: Rename `ASCII-8BIT` encoding to `BINARY` https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18576#change-106320 * Author: byroot (Jean Boussier) * Status: Open * Priority: Normal * Target version: 3.4 ---------------------------------------- ### Context I'm now used to it, but something that confused me for years was errors such as: ```ruby
"fée" + "\xFF".b (irb):3:in `+': incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and ASCII-8BIT (Encoding::CompatibilityError)
When you aren't that familiar with Ruby, it's really not evident that `ASCII-8BIT` basically means "no encoding" or "binary".
And even when you know it, if you don't read carefully it's very easily confused with `US-ASCII`.
The `Encoding::BINARY` alias is much more telling IMHO.
### Proposal
Since `Encoding::ASCII_8BIT` has been aliased as `Encoding::BINARY` for years, I think renaming it to `BINARY` and then making asking `ASCII_8BIT` the alias would significantly improve usability without backward compatibility concerns.
The only concern I could see would be the consistency with a handful of C API functions:
- `rb_encoding *rb_ascii8bit_encoding(void)`
- `int rb_ascii8bit_encindex(void)`
- `VALUE rb_io_ascii8bit_binmode(VALUE io)`
But that's for much more advanced users, so I don't think it's much of a concern.
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