[ruby-core:107440] [Ruby master Feature#18368] Range#step semantics for non-Numeric ranges

Issue #18368 has been updated by Dan0042 (Daniel DeLorme).


"Dead-on-arrival" hyberbole aside, it does seem that using `+` semantics would allow Range#step to work "for free" with many existing classes.

More importantly, there is no need to introduce any backward incompatibility: if begin_object is a string and step is integer, the legacy behavior can be kept instead of raising an exception. So  `("a".."z").step(3)` and `(''..'######').step('#')` are not mutually exclusive.

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Feature #18368: Range#step semantics for non-Numeric ranges
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/18368#change-96342

* Author: zverok (Victor Shepelev)
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
----------------------------------------
I am sorry if the question had already been discussed, can't find the relevant topic.

"Intuitively", this looks (for me) like a meaningful statement:

```ruby
(Time.parse('2021-12-01')..Time.parse('2021-12-24')).step(1.day).to_a
#                                                         ^^^^^ or just 24*60*60
```
Unfortunately, it doesn't work with "TypeError (can't iterate from Time)".
Initially it looked like a bug for me, but after digging a bit into code/docs, I understood that `Range#step` has an odd semantics of "advance the begin N times with `#succ`, and yield the result", with N being always integer:
```ruby
('a'..'z').step(3).first(5)
# => ["a", "d", "g", "j", "m"]
```

The fact that semantic is "odd" is confirmed by the fact that for Float it is redefined to do what I "intuitively" expected:
```ruby
(1.0..7.0).step(0.3).first(5)
# => [1.0, 1.3, 1.6, 1.9, 2.2] 
```
(Like with [`Range#===` some time ago](https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/14575), I believe that to be a strong proof of the wrong generic semantics, if for numbers the semantics needed to be redefined completely.)

Another thing to note is that "skip N elements" seem to be rather "generically Enumerable-related" yet it isn't defined on `Enumerable` (because nobody needs this semantics, typically!)

Hence, two questions:
* Can we redefine generic `Range#step` to new semantics (of using `begin + step` iteratively)? It is hard to imagine the amount of actual usage of the old behavior (with String?.. to what end?) in the wild
* If the answer is "no", can we define a new method with new semantics, like, IDK, `Range#over(span)`?



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