Remember that long-term solution for conversions between strings and arrays of bytes that I mentioned last week that the Parrot people were discussing?

No? Well, anyway, NotFound++ wrote one, and he suggested I try it for my Str⇄Buf conversions. It worked!

I thought I would get more than that done this week, but I didn't. Oh well. For next week, there are still a few low-hanging branches of fruit to persue.

• I want to add postfix:<[ ]> indexing to the Buf class, so it feels a bit more Positional.
• There's a lot of bounds-checking that needs to be made, both in the constructor and in decoding.
• I have UTF-8 down pat; need to find a way to convince Parrot to do other encodings, such as ISO-8859-1.
• There's one test that talks about NFD. Haven't even started looking at that yet.

It's interesting to see where all the effort goes. I've spent most of my time so far on the Str.encode and Buf.decode methods, and almost everything else is trivial in comparison. Feels like some sort of 90%-10% rule at work.