[ruby-core:57323] [ruby-trunk - Feature #7797] Hash should be renamed to StrictHash and a new Hash should be created to behave like AS HashWithIndifferentAccess

Issue #7797 has been updated by Sing9898 (Sing Lou).


 alternative solution to this problem:
make {a:"b"} mean {"a"=>"b"}
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Feature #7797: Hash should be renamed to StrictHash and a new Hash should be created to behave like AS HashWithIndifferentAccess
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7797#change-41931

Author: rosenfeld (Rodrigo Rosenfeld Rosas)
Status: Open
Priority: Normal
Assignee: matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Category: core
Target version: Next Major


Since #7792 has been rejected (although I don't really understand the reason except people being afraid of changing I guess) I'd like to propose an alternative solution to most of the problems caused by the differences between symbols and strings.

From my previous experience, most of the time I'm accessing a hash, I'd prefer that it behaved like HashWithIndifferentAccess (HWIA from now) from active_support gem.

Transforming all possible hashes in some object to HWIA is not only boring to do code but also time consuming.

Instead, I propose that {}.class == Hash, with Hash being implemented as HWIA and the current Hash implementation renamed to StrictHash.

That way, this should work:

a = {a: 1, 'b' => 2}
a[:a] == a['a'] && a['b'] == a[:b]

I don't really see any real use case where people really want to have a hash like this:

h = {a: 1, 'a' => 2}

This would only confuse people.

It also avoids confusion when parsing/unparsing from popular serialization formats, like JSON:

currently:

h = {a: 1}
j = JSON.unparse h
h2 = JSON.parse j
h[:a] != h2[:a]

With the new proposition (I'm assuming JSON should use Hash instead of StrictHash when parsing) h[:a] == h2[:a].

This is just a small example but most real-world usage for hashes would benefit from regular hashes behaving like HWIA.


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