[ruby-core:40006] Re: 2.0 feature questionnaire

Here is my wishlist for ruby (some things I have wished for have
already come true, thanks core folk!):

Object#present? # false for nil and [] and {}, true for everything
else, see thread.

__DIR__ (use it all the time...)

String#contain? and Enumerable#contain? # why force only one way? :)

Object#in? # see earlier discussion, kind of similar to Comparable#between
   Since arrays are native types, objects being related to them seems
good idea to me.  This would be less necessary if we had
Enumerable#contain? but nice either way.

OS.windows? # like OS gem

and a few others I use less often, but still would be nice...:
String#blank?

OS.ruby_bin OS.bits # like OS gem

Object#andand # andand gem or #try equivalent, though I don't reach
for it much, it would be useful.

Float#to_pretty_s # bring back 1.8's Float#to_s functionality.  Though
I personally don't care some out there might.

have method declaration return an unbound method object, so you can do
things like
def go a
end.do_something!

(Time.now - Time.now) to return some "time diff" object, so you can
ask it how many days and hours it is, etc.

Beyond that I would just like to see better documentation officially
sanctioned, user editable *tutorials* so that Rubyists don't have to
turn to a book as often as they do now.  And I'd be happy to
contribute, and have, to the wikibook.

Making it faster would be nice (though I do notice some nice speedups
already), but is difficult I guess.
Maybe core could create an "llvm JIT translator" for KRI's bytecode?
Here's to wishing :)

Adding a high quality multiple process concurrency library (like
python's multiprocess) might be nice, though pmahoney seems to be
working on something like that:
http://nextsprocket.com/tasks/ruby-multi-processing-gem (or is this
redundant to the MVM stuff? Sorry I don't know much about it).


Cheers, and thanks for such a great language!

-roger-