Re: Ruby 1.9/1.8 compatibility: String#lines

> |It seems the most important change in 1.9, in terms of compatibility, is
> |that String isn't Enumerable anymore. It breaks a lot of scripts on my
> |system.
> 
> I put "lines" before calling "each".
Maybe I didn't explain my problem well enough, sorry. If I do this, my
script can run with Ruby 1.9, sure.

But Ruby 1.8 says:

  undefined method `lines' for "Foo\nbar":String (NoMethodError)

so it won't run under both versions.

I feel that many people (me, for a start) will want to make their
libraries available for both versions in the next 2 or 3 years, if not
longer.

So I'm searching for a bullet-proof way to make String enumeration
transparent from 1.8/1.9.

The most simple way that comes to my mind is to add at least String#to_a
to Ruby 1.9, with the Ruby 1.8 behavior. This would still force the
people to adjust their libs, but at least they'll have an easy option
not to break backwards compatibility instead.

I dare to say that otherwise, something like the "dirty fix" from my
previous post is likely to show up in Rails 2.0, or whenever they decide
to go 1.9 ;)

> |I couldn't find an easy way to make scripts running under both 1.8 and 1.9:
> |
> |- String#each_line requires a block in 1.8, and writing each_line{}
> |  isn't really beautiful.
> 
> If you want to iterate on lines in a string, each_line is the best
> name to describe the behavior, I think.  YMMV.
yes, it is, but the problem is that each_line doesn't provide the
functionality of String#lines. it requires a block, and it doesn't
return an enumerator. so using each_line doesn't do the trick either.

by the way: I love the new Enumerators!
[murphy]