From: Jean-Hugues ROBERT <jean_hugues_robert@...>
Date: 2002-05-02T03:49:34+09:00
Subject: Re: Auto-quoting simple hash keys?

Hello,

At 03:35 02/05/2002 +0900, Berger, Daniel wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>What would people think of auto-quoting simple hash keys in Ruby (ala Perl)?
>
>i.e. hash[key] would be equivalent to hash['key']
>
>Assuming this is possible (Matz), is it something people would be interested
>in?

That would basically mean that the "default" value for an un-initialized 
variable would be its string name. I feel that too often already I am 
loosing time simply because I spelled wrongly a variable's name...

hash[:key] is not that much longer, is it ? Plus, Symbol are efficient.

BTW: Optimization guess: cache the "hash code" of a String, when there is 
room for saving a Word, due to alignment of malloc() (that often alloc on 8 
bytes boundaries, 16 on some architectures) (pad with zeros when cache is 
not set).

Yours,

Jean-Hugues

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