x.rb

To begin our explorations, let's look at an example from the Internet
Relay Chat (IRC) protocol. The following string represents the
command that you'd need to send to an IRC server to post a message
to a particular channel:

```ruby
"PRIVMSG #practicing-ruby-testing :Seasons greetings to you all!\r\n"
```

Even if you've never used IRC before or looked into its implementation
details, you can extract a great deal of meaning from this single line 
of text. The structure is very simple, so it's fairly obvious that
`PRIVMSG` represents a command, `#practicing-ruby-testing` represents
the channel, and that the message to be delivered is 
`"Seasons greetings to you all!"`. If I asked you to parse this
string to produce the following array, you probably would have
no trouble doing so without any further instruction:

```ruby
["PRIVMSG", "#practicing-ruby-testing", "Seasons greetings to you all!"]
```

But if you were treating this as more than just an academic exercise,
you might start to wonder more about the nuances of the protocol. Here
are a few questions that might come up after a few minutes of
careful thought:

* What is the significance of the `:` character? Does it always signify 
the start of the message contents, or does it mean something else?

* Why does the message end in `\r\n`? Can messages contain newlines,
and if so, should they be represented as `\n` or `\r\n`, or something
else entirely?

* Will messages always take the form `"PRIVMSG #channelname :Message Body\r\n"`, 
or are their cases where additional information will be provided?

* Can channel names include spaces? How about `:` characters?

Try as we might, no amount of analyzing this single example will answer 
these questions for us. That leads us to a very important point: 
Understanding  the *meaning* of a message doesn't necessarily mean that 
we know how to process the information contained within it.