[ruby-core:103119] [Ruby master Feature#17472] HashWithIndifferentAccess like Hash extension

Issue #17472 has been updated by duerst (Martin Dst).


marcandre (Marc-Andre Lafortune) wrote in #note-21:
> duerst (Martin Dst) wrote in #note-20:
> > Javascript doesn't have symbols in the first place
> 
> Actually, it does (since ES 6): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Symbol

Thanks for the pointer. I haven't fully understood that page, but it seems to me that in JS, the 'uniqueness' aspect is much more important, and there are less similarities with strings than in Ruby. Also, the interface on JS symbols is much smaller than in Ruby, and quite inconvenient except for some very narrow use cases.


joelb (Joel Blum) wrote in #note-22:
> > Actually, it does (since ES 6): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Symbol
> 
> I find it very unlikely any language will make symbols the default hash keys like Ruby did.

Definitely not JS, see above. But what about various Lisp variants?

> > String are meant for input/output of text. Symbols are identifier for developers.
> 
> Why do you need that distinction?

You don't need that distinction. There is also no need to distinguish integers and floats. Most programming languages make that distinction, but some, including JS, don't (or didn't?).

There is also no strict need to distinguish between strings and numbers. Almost all programming languages have such a distinction, but in Perl (+most shells, awk,...), a string that looks like a number is just a number, and any number is a string. Some languages (e.g. Python, Haskell) provide arrays and tuples, others (e.g. Ruby, JS last time I checked) have only arrays. Some languages distinguish between characters and strings (Ruby up to version 1.8, C), others don't (Ruby from version 1.9,...).

Each choice has its reasons, advantages, and disadvantages. If all programming languages were the same, it would be very boring.

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Feature #17472: HashWithIndifferentAccess like Hash extension
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/17472#change-91187

* Author: naruse (Yui NARUSE)
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Target version: 3.1
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Rails has [ActiveSupport::HashWithIndifferentAccess](https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/HashWithIndifferentAccess.html), which is widely used in Rails to handle Request, Session, ActionView's form construction, ActiveRecord's DB communication, and so on. It receives String or Symbol and normalize them to fetch the value. But it is implemented with Ruby. If we provide C implementation of that, Rails will gain the performance improvement.

summary of previous discussion: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/40182#issuecomment-687607812



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