From: "C. Dagnon" <c-soc-rubyforum@...>
Date: 2009-03-05T06:32:31+09:00
Subject: Re: Any solutions to Ruby's inconsistencies?

Yossef Mendelssohn wrote:
> There's been endless discussion and confusion about Symbols, Strings,
> what they mean, what they should be used for, and their relation to
> each other. Rails did not help with HashWithIndifferentAccess, though
> I imagine they thought they would. But I don't want to start anything

I'm happy I didn't miss anything and sad to hear I'm not alone in that 
confusion.

> like that up. I just want to point out that a lot of that code is
> unnecessary and could just be:
> 
>     key = map.keys.detect { |k|  k.to_s.downcase ==
> matcher.to_s.downcase }

Hmmm, what is 'detect'?

I had been doing that, but then I thought that compiling a single regex 
would be less expensive than downcasing everything every time they got 
compared.  Not that the example I included appears in any of my code, 
but I've been doing it for similar situations to allow for things like 
case-indifferent parameters.


>> 4. And what's up with Ruby incorrectly naming their Map 'Hash'?
> ...
> At least they're not called "dictionaries", right? Am I right?

Yes, definitely right on that one.
Okay, so that was a Perl influence.  Darn.

> ...
> Hey, why aren't Arrays called Maps instead?

Sure arrays can be considered special kinds of maps.  The ordering 
problem could be solved by my_map.keys.sort.each instead of 
my_array.each.  The major difference I see is that Arrays have 
type-checked and validated keys (non-negative integers), though I would 
also say there's an assumption in how I've gotten used to using arrays 
that if there is an element 5, there are elements 0-4 (even if nil).


Thanks for the reply!

-Chris
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