From: James Coglan <jcoglan@...>
Date: 2009-08-05T20:44:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Bizarre Range behavior

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2009/8/5 Brian Candler <b.candler@pobox.com>

> Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> > What if I sprinkle more magic to the language and change String#upto
> > to generate numerical sequences when all characters in edges are
> > digits, so that
> >
> > irb> ("2".."19").to_a
> > => ["2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "10", "11", "12", "13",
> > "14", "15", "16", "17", "18", "19"]
> > irb> ("2"..."20").to_a
> > => ["2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "10", "11", "12", "13",
> > "14", "15", "16", "17", "18", "19", "20"]
> >
> > Any opinion?
>
> -1 for added complexity with little benefit


I'm also against this. I prefer explicit type conversions here: changing
behaviour because a string happens to look like a number will likely cause
more problems than it solves. In fact this kind of thing shows up in
JavaScript and it usually masks bugs where the developer has failed to
properly handle user input.

If this change were to go ahead, I'd also argue for changing String#+ to
recognise numbers, which might also mean changing Numeric#+ for symmetry.

--
James Coglan
http://jcoglan.com

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