From: "T. Onoma" <transami@...>
Date: 2004-09-05T08:15:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Hashes and ordering

On Saturday 04 September 2004 06:15 pm, Hal Fulton wrote:

> I won't address this today, but I will save this list.

I talked this nearly to death about two years ago. It's somewhere in the 
ruby-talk archives. But to summarize:

I came up with the idea of an indexed hash, basically a combined version of an 
array and a hash, that could do both's job, plain and simple. But others told 
me it would cause lookup conflicts because the hash key could be an integer. 
The fix is to have different lookup mechanisms.

  ih = [ :a => 1, :b => 2 ]

  ih[0] #=> 1
  ih[1] #=> 2

  ih{:a} #=> 1
  ih{:b} #=> 2

  ih.pair(0) #=> :a, 1
  ih.pair(1) #=> :b, 2

  etc.

At one point I even asked what others thought about association (=>) being an 
operator/method. You could arbitrarily do it anywhere.

  a = "bomb!"
  a => 'hal'   # returns an association object

  # also links 'hal' into a
  p "#{a} is the #{a.association}"  #=> "Hal is the bomb!"

Obviously this could then be utilized by arrrays.

  [ :a => 1, :b => 2 ]

An array of two associations.

Would be fun to play with this some more.

-T