From: Sam McCall <tunah.usenet@...>
Date: 2004-09-08T18:00:13+09:00
Subject: Re: [RCR] Unified type conversion framework

Cool! Occasionally I think about doing something like this, so I can 
have some nice way to remember the custom conversions I use.
Maybe you could sneak some extra conversions in with it, like
[[1,2],[3,4]].as Hash # => {1=>2,3=>4}

Related to this is type-checking when you do want it (duck typing is 
good, but I'd give it up in some cases to have an easy, readable way of 
checking that I'm not passing a hash instead of an array).
I'd really like to be able to do:
def method(foo,bar)
	foo.is! Hash
	bar.can_be! Array
	#...
end
where they do something like
def is! t
	raise TypeError.new("Expected a #{t} but got a " +
            "#{self.type}: #{self.inspect}") unless is_a? t
end

def can_be! t
	raise TypeError.new("Can't convert to #{t} from "+
            "#{self.type}: #{self.inspect}") unless can_be? t
end

And can_be? is the does-this-conversion-exist method.
This might even be rdoc-able, if it was at the top of a method. It'd 
certainly make the ad-hoc documentation I write today executable.

Sam