From: Jeremy Heiler <jeremyheiler@...>
Date: 2011-06-25T07:04:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Honoring #to_ary and such

On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 4:09 PM, Intransition <transfire@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jun 24, 3:57 pm, Jeremy Heiler <jeremyhei...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> It depends. Do you want to? I suppose the only disadvantage would be
>> the cost of an object possibly creating a new array when to_ary is
>> invoked.
>
> No, I don't really ;-) But... I've always been under the impression
> that something that responds to #to_ary should be treated as such.
> Thanks to duck-typing I've never really had to give it much thought
> before.

That sounds reasonable, but I still think it depends on what you're
really trying to do.

Iv'e always considered #to_ary to mean: "transform my state into an
array, which may or may not be expensive." In which I would leave it
up to the programmer to decide if they want to call #to_a, and let it
fail if they don't.

My opinion here would be different if it meant: "here's my state as an
array, which I have been keeping up-to-date all along.