From: James Gray <james@...>
Date: 2009-08-05T23:00:04+09:00
Subject: Re: Bizarre Range behavior

On Aug 5, 2009, at 1:27 AM, Daniel Berger wrote:

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Yukihiro Matsumoto [mailto:matz@ruby-lang.org]
>> Sent: Tuesday, August 04, 2009 10:56 PM
>> To: ruby-talk ML
>> Subject: Re: Bizarre Range behavior
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> In message "Re: Bizarre Range behavior"
>>    on Wed, 5 Aug 2009 05:32:37 +0900, Rob Biedenharn
>> <Rob@AgileConsultingLLC.com> writes:
>>
>> |Knowing this, here's an even more bizzare-looking example:
>> |
>> |irb> "19".succ
>> |=> "20"
>> |irb> ("2".."19").to_a
>> |=> []
>> |irb> ("2"..."20").to_a
>> |=> ["2", "3", "4", "5", "6", "7", "8", "9", "10", "11", "12", "13",
>> |"14", "15", "16", "17", "18", "19"]
>>
>> 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?  I already made a patch for trunk.
>
> I vote against. If people want numeric ranges, it's their job to use
> numerics, not magically convert stringy numbers into actual numbers.  
> This isn't Perl after all.

I agree.  I'm against the change.

James Edward Gray II