From: "marcandre (Marc-Andre Lafortune)" <ruby-core@...>
Date: 2013-06-03T05:08:56+09:00
Subject: [ruby-core:55261] [ruby-trunk - Feature #8478] The hash returned by Enumerable#group_by should have an empty array for its default value


Issue #8478 has been updated by marcandre (Marc-Andre Lafortune).


I understand the idea, but there are problems with this.

First of, it's a really bad idea to set the default of a hash to a mutable object:

    a = [1, 2, 3, "a", "b"]
    g = a.group_by {|o| o.class }
    g[Array] << [:foo]
    g[Hash] # => [[:foo]], you expected []

Assuming now that your request was instead to change the default proc to {|hash, key| hash[key] = []}, which would not cause the problem above, you still have the problem of incompatibility.
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Feature #8478: The hash returned by Enumerable#group_by should have an empty array for its default value
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/8478#change-39655

Author: phiggins (Pete Higgins)
Status: Open
Priority: Normal
Assignee: 
Category: 
Target version: 


Without this patch, nil checks might need to be done on the return value of Enumerable#group_by:

$ cat test_group_by.rb 
a = [1, 2, 3, "a", "b"]
g = a.group_by {|o| o.class }

puts "Fixnums: #{g[Fixnum].size}"
puts "Strings: #{g[String].size}"
puts "Arrays: #{g[Array].size}"

$ ruby test_group_by.rb 
Fixnums: 3
Strings: 2
test_group_by.rb:6:in `<main>': undefined method `size' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)

This patch adds a default value of an empty array to the hash returned by Enumerable#group_by, so the script above will work:

$ ./ruby -I.:lib test_group_by.rb 
Fixnums: 3
Strings: 2
Arrays: 0



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