From: Intransition <transfire@...>
Date: 2010-04-15T20:06:42+09:00
Subject: 1.9's New Methods

First a big shout-out to Marc-Andre Lafortune and his <a href="http://
github.com/marcandre/backports">backports</a> project. Nice work.

Now I want to ask if others have noticed all the new methods being add
to 1.9+? I'm quite happy about vast majority of it, but there was at
least one method I thought pretty peculiar. This Enumerable method:

  def flat_map(&block)
    return to_enum(:flat_map) unless block_given?
    map(&block).flatten(1)
  end unless method_defined? :flat_map
  Backports.alias_method self, :collect_concat, :flat_map

I am very curious to know how it was decided that a normal map
followed by a 1-deep flatten is common enough to warrant its own
method? Two in fact!