From: Dr Nic <drnicwilliams@...>
Date: 2006-10-01T14:44:45+09:00
Subject: Re: New magical version of Symbol.to_proc

Trans wrote:
> Charles O Nutter wrote:
>> The pluralization thing has too much potential for collision and looks
>> jarring (to_as looks to me like "to" "as", which doesn't make any
>> sense; then again I'm not a fan of programmatic pluralization for any
>> reason, since it's very western-language-centric and far from
>> foolproof (moose? virus? fish?)).
> 
> You are right there. Pluralization is really going overboard, besides
> the exceptions it creates a great deal of computational overhead. It
> seems great on the surface, but in the end it is simply is not worth
> the effort. Although it can seem odd for the English speaker at times,
> Ruby's general favoring of the singular is a very good thing. And this
> is one area in which I feel Rails has been unhelpful.

The way I coded it, it singularizes the string and passes that as the 
method call for the items of the collection. So if you pass a singular 
method name, then it will still be singular when its passed to the 
children.

That is:

people.names

returns the same list of names as

people.name

So non-English speakers can be happy too. Of course, if the people Array 
class had a name method, the latter wouldn't work. But unless you have 
an Array of Arrays, you won't get many name conflicts btw the Array 
class and the container class.

Re: performance overhead - I'm not sure if the standard map+block is 
more or less efficient than a for-loop, but I use it anyway because my 
code is much more readable and writable. If I later discovered that I 
had a performance bottleneck near my map+blocks, then I could refactor 
them for speed.

I don't think that in a thread on "fun syntax ideas" disapproving on the 
ideas based on small performance hits like "apply a gsub on a string" is 
much fun. :(

Cheers
Nic

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