Issue #20235 has been updated by shan (Shannon Skipper). A `$stdin.closed?#=>true` would work as expected. You can't generally follow Ruby code immediately with an uncommented `=>` designating a return value and have it not break. It made sense to maintain character literals for compatibility between Ruby 1.8 and 1.9, since String#[] and the character literal both returned an ordinal. So with `string = 'a'` a `string[0]` would be `97` like an `?a` literal. In the time where Ruby 1.8 and Ruby 1.9 were both a thing, using character literals was strongly discouraged in Ruby 1.9 due to a likely incompatibility with 1.8. Now that 1.8 is long gone, a character literal is now once again perfectly safe. What I question is whether we should resume using character literals, since they're now fine to use, or whether their continued existence was purely for 1.8 compat and they should be deprecated and retired. It would be really nice to document which is the case. ---------------------------------------- Feature #20235: Deprecate CHAR syntax https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/20235#change-106585 * Author: Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme) * Status: Open * Priority: Normal ---------------------------------------- I propose deprecating the `?c` syntax. It served a purpose in ruby <= 1.8, but no longer. The reason I'm proposing this is because today I ran into this error: ```ruby p $stdin.closed?=>true # comparison of String with true failed (ArgumentError) ``` I was completed mystified, and had to resort to Ripper to figure out what's going on ``` p *Ripper.lex("p $stdin.closed?=>true") [[1, 0], :on_ident, "p", CMDARG] [[1, 1], :on_sp, " ", CMDARG] [[1, 2], :on_gvar, "$stdin", END] [[1, 8], :on_period, ".", DOT] [[1, 9], :on_ident, "closed", ARG] [[1, 15], :on_CHAR, "?=", END] #OOOOHH!!!!! [[1, 17], :on_op, ">", BEG] [[1, 18], :on_kw, "true", END] ``` We don't have to commit to a removal schedule right now, but I think it would at least be good to print a deprecation message if $VERBOSE. -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/