From: Joel VanderWerf <joelvanderwerf@...>
Date: 2010-07-08T02:11:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Global method usage in standard libs

Alexander E. Fischer wrote:
> Pathname['/home/someone']

I like this pattern. Note that there is some precedent in the core: 
Array, Hash, and Struct classes all have a [] class method (not 
necessarily equivalent to #new).

It's also fairly well used in the stdlib and the gems I happen to have 
installed:

$ ri '[]' | grep -oP '\S+::\[\]\S+'
WEBrick::HTTPStatus::[],
Dir::[],
Array::[],
Hash::[],
Set::[],
Matrix::[],
Vector::[],
Generators::AllReferences::[],
Net::SSH::Version::[],
YAML::Pairs::[],
YAML::Omap::[],
Webby::Filters::[],
Webby::Filters::[],
CodeRay::FileType::[],
Pure::[],
Rake::Task::[],
Rake::FileList::[],
JSON::[],
JSON::[],
MIME::Types::[],
OrderedHash::[],
NArray::[],
Nokogiri::EncodingHandler::[],
Nokogiri::HTML::ElementDescription::[],
Nokogiri::CSS::Parser::[]=,
Nokogiri::CSS::Parser::[],
MultiRBTree::[],


But note that some of these, like Dir#[], are not the same as #new.

But I don't know how easy it will be to convince people to live with the 
deprecation warning for Pathname et al. I wouldn't mind it.