[ruby-talk:11062] Re: to_s and <<

----- Original Message -----
From: "Stephen White" <[e-mail]>
> Gawd, I'm thick. I overlooked this when it was jumping up and down and

Don't beat yourself up--give the rest of us a chance!

> In abject apology, here's the right answer (I think!)...

There has been lots of good information in this thread.

I understand that Ruby: The Language doesn't do automatic type conversion,
which is just fine with me.  However, many library routines, including print
and join effectively do conversion to string for you.  Java also will call
toString() for you if you make it obvious that's what you need.  With the
pickaxe book as my "inspired word" companion, I'm trying to write things
"The Ruby Way."

I've written a module with a hierarchy of classes and I wanted to include a
test function in the module to put each class through its paces.  Part of
this takes the form:

o = MyObject.new
$stdout << o << "\n"

This is fine for simple objects, but for objects containing arrays and
hashes, my to_s method must aggregate the contents first: result = '';
ary.each {|item| result << item}

If the consensus seems to be that to_s is required, I'll mark up my "bible"
(anObject -> aString) and carry on.

Thanks everyone for your input.

Brent