From: gabriele renzi <surrender_it@...>
Date: 2005-09-09T04:56:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Lexical Casts with Ruby

Eric Mahurin ha scritto:
>>>If this is a good solution for you, maybe an RCR for this
>>
>>more
>>
>>>general conversion mechanism is in order.
>>
>>See RCR#280.  The implementation is 34 lines long.
> 
> 
> Don't know why I missed that one.  I don't really like the
> implementation with the global (or rather class variable) hash.
>  I would rather see an encapsulated API - each class gives
> methods for converting to/from objects of other classes of
> interest (i.e. String).  
<snip>

The reason for the global transformation table is basically being able 
to handle any kind of "type" not just Classes. I like to think of ruby 
as object based more than Class based.

Anyway, even if your approach is more conservative, I'd appreciate if it 
was blessed[1].

I wonder what matz think of this stuff.


[1]
what I'd really like to see is multimethods. Just specialize #new and 
everything goes fine ;)