From: Jim Weirich <jim@...>
Date: 2005-05-28T10:08:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Coercion and ranges


Philipp Kern said:
>  From my understanding the conversion should happen automatically when
> coercion is properly implemented. Surely one could just add "to_a" to
> all the ranges, but it certainly made me pondering about it.

I find it a bit odd that adding two ranges  results in an array, but
assuming that is /really/ what you want, you could indicate a Range's
willingness to be converted to an array by including a to_ary method.

  class Range
    def to_ary
      to_a
    end
  end

  >  (?A..?C) + (?a..?c) + (?x..?y)
  => [65, 66, 67, 97, 98, 99, 120, 121]

The difference between to_a and to_ary is that to_a is an explicit
conversion to an array.  to_ary indicates that whenever the object is
found in the context where an array is desired, it can be treated as an
array by calling to_ary (an implicit conversion).

-- 
-- Jim Weirich     jim@weirichhouse.org    http://onestepback.org
-----------------------------------------------------------------
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct,
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)