From: Yossef Mendelssohn <ymendel@...>
Date: 2008-08-15T07:07:05+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby wish-list

On Aug 14, 2:35 pm, Roger Pack <rogerpack2...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Rubbing the lamp....
> I wish...
>
> a = [1,2,3,4]
>
> a[0..1, 4]
>
> or
>
> a[1,2,3]
>
> worked.

Two things:

1) In my mind, this general thread is somewhat ridiculous. It's been
going on for -- what is it? -- ten months now? It seems to be just a
laundry list for things you want Ruby to do, whether they're sensible
or not, without a lot of thought into them, and at least sometimes
with reasoning like "I'm lazy and don't want to type some brackets".

2) "I wish X worked" is not a very useful way to describe what should
happen. I'm not saying you have to write tests or specs, but do
describe the behavior you expect. Maybe looking at the RubySpec
project will give you an idea of everything Ruby presently "should do"
and what the other implementations are working towards. If that
doesn't get you going, think about it as contributing to Rubinius in
some way, and the sooner that comes out the sooner you can easily
twist even more of Ruby to your desires.

When you're working on describing the behavior, consider this (from an
irb session in Ruby 1.8.6):

>> arr = (1..10).to_a
=> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
>> arr[3,4]
=> [4, 5, 6, 7]

You seem to want arr[3,4] to return [4,5], and guess what? There's a
way to do that now:

>> arr.values_at(3,4)
=> [4, 5]

Let's say you don't care for Array#values_at and Array#[] is changed
to work as you expect. What will happen when someone who expects the
old behavior tries to use it?

--
-yossef