From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2006-03-24T18:33:53+09:00
Subject: How is Symbol#to_int useful? (should it exist?)

I had a situation in a DSL like so:

  str = '0'*n

Where n in one context could be a Symbol.  If n happened to be a Symbol, I 
wanted to get an error message.  However, I found that if n is a symbol you 
could get a very long string of 0's because there is a Symbol#to_int method 
which returns a unique integer for each Symbol object (actually, it calls 
Symbol#to_i).  And so I don't get the error message I want to get because the 
symbol gets converted to an Integer automatically.  So what's the usefulness of 
the Symbol#to_int method?  I'm just undefining it like so:

  class Symbol
    undef_method :to_int
  end

....that works for my purposes, but I wonder why there is a 
Symbol#to_int method in the library.  Why not just require that Symbol#to_i be 
called explicitly if that's what you want?

Phil