From: George Ogata <g_ogata@...>
Date: 2005-02-17T05:44:51+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] FaceToFace 0.1.0

benny <listen@marcrenearns.de> writes:

> Benny is happy to announce his first published piece of software:
> "FaceToFace" available as gem.
>
>
> Dear list,
>
> I hope this is useful for someone and I am curious what you think about it.
>
> The code itself is no big deal and always open for improvements (as my
> english is).
>
> = Overview
>
> FaceToFace aims to standardize the conversion and messaging 
> between classes and objects. 
>
> You may think of it as syntactic sugar and as duck-typing taken to 
> the next level (imagine two ducks face to face, none of them being a real
> duck).
>
> Up to now we had to remember each method that converts to a 
> certain class, e.g. 'to_i' converts to Integer, 'to_s' converts to String
> etc.
>
> With FaceToFace you only have to remember one method and 
> you need to know the class to convert to, e.g.
>   5.to(String ) #=> "5"
>   "6".to( Integer ) #=> 6
>
> That way you could double-ducktype, i.e. you may not care 
> about the class of any object you convert to or from, e.g.
>   def double_duck_me( duck1, duck2 )
>       duck1.to( duck2.class_name )
>   end
>
> Instead of using to() you could also use from() to access the result of a
> conversion, e.g.
>     Array.from( "test" ) #=> ["test"]
>     String.from( 4 ) #=> "4"
>
> [etc.]

Have you seen http://rcrchive.net/rcr/show/280 ?  There might be ideas
for you in there.