From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2011-10-04T16:18:05+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] equal_rights_for_hash 0.0.4 + Ruby proposal

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 3:29 AM, Suraj N. Kurapati <sunaku@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Despite the discussion in the bug I still do not understand why this
is useful.  I notice that I have never missed this functionality.  It
also seems that converting to a Hash is not as straightforward as
converting to an Array (because of the pairing of values).  What would
be gained?  Can you provide a number of use cases that demonstrate
overall usefulness?

Kind regards

robert

-- 
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