At the very least, the win32 implementation of Ruby's IO.readlines() method keeps the newline character on each string in the array. Considering that it is the newline that defines a "line," it would not be wholly unreasonable to omit it from the array, returned. I would have imagined that it was implemented using String.split(), which omits the splitting character. On a simply practical note, I'm sure the former is more popular than the latter in the following: out = File.open('file.txt', 'r'){|file| file.readlines.collect{|line| line.chomp}} out = File.open('file.txt', 'r'){|file| } ...in that rarely do people actually want newlines in their strings. Interestingly enough, I discovered this behaviour from a bug in a program which was hidden by another peculiar function, puts(). Can you imagine my surprise that puts() not only appends a newline to a string printed to stdout but, if a newline already exists, it doesn't bother appending one! So, printing strings with puts() can hide whether strings have a newline or not. Weird... So, who thinks my suggested change is a good idea? How do I go about popularizing my opinion? Thank you...