From: Joel VanderWerf <vjoel@...>
Date: 2004-12-02T03:12:10+09:00
Subject: Re: to_s, inspect, etc.

Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Dec 2004, Hal Fulton wrote:
> 
>> Charles Mills wrote:
>>
>>> On Nov 30, 2004, at 8:15 PM, trans. (T. Onoma) wrote:
>>>
>>>> Indeed. I like the idea that #inspect produce a string that will 
>>>> produce an
>>>> equivalent object when passed through #eval. This already works for 
>>>> literal
>>>> forms like Array.
>>>>
>>>
>>> like:
>>> my_instance.inspect #=> "MyClass.new(10,11,12,'ducks')"
>>>
>>> not sure if I like that ;)
>>
>>
>> It's an interesting idea, but I wouldn't favor using #inspect
>> for that.
> 
> 
> I'd like something like this.  It would mean one could marshal data
> in a readable form, and not have the Pythonesque whitespace issues
> that YAML brings.
> 
> YAML is very good for many things, but if other people (whose
> background is unknown) need to edit the data, you can bet one of
> them will not notice the whitespace subtleties, and break something.
> I'd like something with the conciseness of ruby or YAML, but with a
> more robust format.
> 
> I don't see how one could create self-referential structures this
> way though, or have an array with more than one occurrance of
> exactly the same object.   I don't want to ask for pointers in Ruby!

You don't need pointers. Just use variables.

Check out amarshal on RAA. It handles references, but it's not as pretty 
as hand-written ruby code.