[ruby-core:107944] [Ruby master Feature#18576] Rename `ASCII-8BIT` encoding to `BINARY`

["Eregon (Benoit Daloze)" <noreply@ruby-lang.org>]

Issue #18576 has been updated by Eregon (Benoit Daloze).


I think it's worth changing, the current name is confusing to most Ruby users, and there were only 71 gems out of 170000+ gems, and those gems were patched.
It seems equally unlikely that many applications would depend on `enc.name == "ASCII-8BIT"`, and that those applications would update to latest Ruby.
If we don't change it now, we will probably never change it and stay forever with that confusing name, that seems really bad for future Ruby.

@matz How about we try it (as experimental or so) before the preview, and based on feedback keep it or revert it?
From your comment in #19 I thought that's what you offered.

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Feature #18576: Rename `ASCII-8BIT` encoding to `BINARY`
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18576#change-96894

* Author: byroot (Jean Boussier)
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
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### 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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