From: Aredridel <aredridel@...>
Date: 2004-09-05T08:39:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Hashes and ordering

Oooh, I like that!


On Sun, 5 Sep 2004 08:15:38 +0900, T. Onoma <transami@runbox.com> wrote:
> 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
> 
>