Issue #18576 has been updated by Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme). tenderlovemaking (Aaron Patterson) wrote in #note-7:

I think this example should raise an exception:

```ruby u = (b = "abcde".force_encoding('ASCII-8BIT')).encode('UTF-8') ```

I'm worried about the above misconception. No, this example shouldn't raise an exception, because being ascii-compatible is the entire reason there's "ASCII" in "ASCII-8BIT". If even @tenderlovemaking can have this misconception, I would wager it's a fairly common one. And if the encoding was renamed to "BINARY" it would further encourage the misconception. We'd wind up with a kind of Frankenstein encoding that pretends to be true binary by its name, but having the behavior of ascii-compatible encodings. This thread has several people currently agreeing that the ascii-compatible behavior should not change, but if the name was changed I can easily predict some people will call for a change in behavior because the name "binary" has that overtone. zverok (Victor Shepelev) wrote in #note-34:

For better or worse, we break compatibility constantly. One of the recent telling examples was the removal of `File.exists?`

I won't say we can never break compatibility, but there's a very big qualitative difference here. If you run into `File.exists?`, the program simply crashes with NoMethodError. If you run into `enc.name == "ASCII-8BIT"` the return value changes from true to false; the program may crash later or not, the bug can remain undetected for a long time, there's a potential for corrupted data. This is 2-3 orders of magnitude harder to debug than NoMethodError. Even if not many people are affected by this, it's a very nasty kind of incompatibility. byroot (Jean Boussier) wrote in #note-15:

We could keep `Encoding#name` as `"ASCII-8BIT"`, but change `Encoding#inspect` and make sure `EncodingError` use the `BINARY` name in its error messages.

I would really like that. ---------------------------------------- Feature #18576: Rename `ASCII-8BIT` encoding to `BINARY` https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18576#change-106302 * 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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