Issue #18576 has been updated by shyouhei (Shyouhei Urabe). @naruse is actually positive for changing error messages (see #note-28). I guess everybody here is agreeing to @byroot's list of proposed changes in #note-37 (except wording)? ---------------------------------------- Feature #18576: Rename `ASCII-8BIT` encoding to `BINARY` https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18576#change-106416 * 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/