From: Eric Hodel <drbrain@...7.net>
Date: 2006-03-24T20:18:39+09:00
Subject: Re: How is Symbol#to_int useful? (should it exist?)

On Mar 24, 2006, at 1:33 AM, Phil Tomson wrote:

> 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?

Symbols used to be just numbers without names attached.

-- 
Eric Hodel - drbrain@segment7.net - http://blog.segment7.net
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