26.6 Mapping for Simple Built‑In Types

The Slice built‑in types are mapped to Ruby types as shown in Table 26.1.

Table 26.1. Mapping of Slice built‑in types to Ruby.

Slice	Ruby
bool	true or false
byte	Fixnum
short	Fixnum
int	Fixnum or Bignum
long	Fixnum or Bignum
float	Float
double	Float
string	String

Although Ruby supports arbitrary precision in its integer types, the Ice run time validates integer values to ensure they have valid ranges for their declared Slice types.

26.6.1 String Mapping

String values returned as the result of a Slice operation (including return values, out parameters, and data members) contain UTF-8 encoded strings unless the program has installed a string converter, in which case string values use the converter’s native encoding instead. See Section 32.24 for more information on string converters.

As string input values for a remote Slice operation, Ice accepts nil in addi­tion to String objects; each occurrence of nil is marshaled as an empty string. Ice assumes that all String objects contain valid UTF-8 encoded strings unless the program has installed a string converter, in which case Ice assumes that String objects use the native encoding expected by the converter.