Issue #18576 has been updated by duerst (Martin Dürst). What about ```

...

"fée" + "fée".b (irb):8:in `+': incompatible character encodings: UTF-8 and BINARY (ASCII-8BIT) (Encoding::CompatibilityError)

This still leaves "ASCII-8BIT" in (because I think it's important to help people understand that BINARY and ASCII-8BIT are the same).

[It also keeps the wart of consecutive parentheticals, but that can be dealt with separately.]

----------------------------------------
Feature #18576: Rename `ASCII-8BIT` encoding to `BINARY`
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18576#change-106889

* 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. -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/