From: Charles Oliver Nutter <headius@...>
Date: 2011-10-26T06:30:59+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:40375] Re: [ruby-trunk - Feature #5479] import StringIO into core, add String#to_io

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 1:35 PM, Aaron Patterson
<tenderlove@ruby-lang.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 02:22:21AM +0900, Haase, Konstantin wrote:
>> My main request was to add String#to_io, as Aaron described, so this protocol can actually be used. This is the only reason why I proposed moving StringIO to core. We could also add String#to_io as a monkey-patch to String in stringio in the stdlib.

Oops, I totally spaced that off. Yeah, that's easy enough.

> I really like this idea, but I'm kind of afraid of the consequences.
> StringIO isn't a subclass of IO, and some things in ruby call `to_io`
> then check the return type:
...
> I'm not sure which is best: convert StringIO to subclass IO, or find
> these places that call `to_io` and fix them. ��Not to mention, how do we
> "fix" the above example? ��What does `exists?` mean in terms of a
> StringIO?

I no longer like the idea myself :) It feels too much to me like
to_str and to_ary and seems to have the same "internals" implications
they do: that they'll return a subclass of that type.

- Charlie