From: "Suraj N. Kurapati" <sunaku@...>
Date: 2011-10-04T10:29:43+09:00
Subject: [ANN] equal_rights_for_hash 0.0.4 + Ruby proposal

Hello,

Although Ruby has a rich set of primitive data types and structures,
the Hash seems neglected in the Ruby API in comparison to its peers:

|           |   Kernel    |  Implicit  |  Explicit  |  NilClass   |
|   Class   |   method    | conversion | conversion | conversion  |
| --------- | ----------- | ---------- | ---------- | ----------- |
|  String   |  String()   |   to_str   |    to_s    |  nil.to_s   |
|  Integer  |  Integer()  |   to_int   |    to_i    |  nil.to_i   |
|   Float   |   Float()   |  to_float  |    to_f    |  nil.to_f   |
|   Array   |   Array()   |   to_ary   |    to_a    |  nil.to_a   |
|   Hash    |   MISSING   |  to_hash   |  MISSING   |   MISSING   |

To rectify this un-orthogonality, I created a small Ruby library:

  (gem)  http://rubygems.org/gems/equal_rights_for_hash

  (code) https://github.com/sunaku/equal_rights_for_hash

  (docs) http://rubydoc.info/gems/equal_rights_for_hash

For more information, please see my proposal to incorporate the
above functionality into Ruby's core API on the Ruby Issue Tracker:

  http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/5008

Thanks for your consideration.

-- 
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we
are headed.