From: Rodrigo Rosenfeld Rosas <rr.rosas@...>
Date: 2011-05-30T21:18:55+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:36582] Re: [Ruby 1.9 - Feature #4801][Open] Shorthand Hash Syntax for Strings

Em 30-05-2011 09:05, Michael Edgar escreveu:
> Since :"#{abc}" is allowed in Ruby, I imagine that any such substitute syntax would preserve that property.
>
> I disagree strongly that Hash, the base class, should special-case the behaviors
> of Strings and Symbols to be equal. It's a hash table, like those encountered in any other language,
> and shouldn't behave unlike typical hash tables. Namely h[a] and h[b] look up the same
> value iff a == b (or a.eql?(b), or whichever equality test you use). Strings and symbols
> are never equal.

Maybe, if we introduced another equality operator for comparing strings 
and symbols, let's say ### (I know this is a terrible representation, 
but I don't care about it now - just the idea):

:"some-symbol" ### 'some-symbol' => true

Unless one of them is not a symbol, it would work as always:

123 ### '123' => false
123 ### 123 => true

Or maybe this operator should have a similar behavior for comparing 
numbers too. For instance, in Perl and other languages, if I remember 
correctly, hash[1] == hash['1'], and I think this is a good thing.

After defining how this operator should behave, than the hash 
implementation would be typical anyway.

I'm not proposing to change this in Ruby because of current existent 
written code that would probably be broken by such a change, but if this 
had been the decision from the beginning it would be fantastic!