From: hanmac@... Date: 2018-01-23T10:46:30+00:00 Subject: [ruby-core:84977] [Ruby trunk Feature#14336] Create new method String#symbol? and deprecate Symbol class Issue #14336 has been updated by Hanmac (Hans Mackowiak). rosenfeld (Rodrigo Rosenfeld Rosas) wrote: > But even if you had, that wouldn't completely fix the issue, because part of the application might use strings as keys while another part of the application might use symbols. thats itself is the problem there it means that the developer doesn't think about his own application enough to know if something would be a String or Symbol, or uses user input without checking which is even worse > There's also the problem that forces us, Ruby developers, to always look at the documentation or other's code, just to figure out whether symbols or strings are supposed to be used as hash keys. you should always check the documentation of the code you use to check all the corner cases where something would throw an Exception ---------------------------------------- Feature #14336: Create new method String#symbol? and deprecate Symbol class https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/14336#change-69685 * Author: dsferreira (Daniel Ferreira) * Status: Rejected * Priority: Normal * Assignee: * Target version: ---------------------------------------- From the discussions on the three previous issues related to the String vs Symbol subject ([5964](https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/5964), [7792](https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/7792), [14277](https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/14277)) there are some conclusions we can assume: * Current String vs Symbol is not the ideal scenario. See: Matz and Koichi comments. * Current philosophy is to use Symbols as identifiers and Strings when strings are needed. * Current situation is that Symbols are being used in many code bases as strings except for strings that really need the String methods. * Current situation is that we are designing APIs to handle both String and Symbol inputs forcing an overhead of API development. I propose the deprecation of `Symbol` class and the introduction of `String#symbol?`. ```ruby foo = :foo foo.class # => String foo.symbol? # => true bar = "bar" bar.class # => String bar.symbol? # => false ``` For backwards compatibility transition path I propose: ```ruby class Symbol def self.===(var) warn ("Warning message regarding deprecated class") if var.class == Symbol true elsif var.class == String && var.symbol? true else false end end end class String def is_a?(klass) case klass when String true when Symbol self.symbol? else false end end end ``` -- https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/ Unsubscribe: