From: wconrad@...
Date: 2002-05-02T04:07:00+09:00
Subject: Re: Auto-quoting simple hash keys?

On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 03:35:06AM +0900, Berger, Daniel wrote:
> What would people think of auto-quoting simple hash keys in Ruby (ala Perl)?
> 
> i.e. hash[key] would be equivalent to hash['key']

No, I would be surprised too often.

When I find myself indexing a hash by only constant strings, it might
mean that I actually need a class instead of a hash.  The wonderful
Struct class makes it very easy to make a data-holder class to use
instead of a hash.  Then I can say foo.key instead of foo['key'] (or
the proposed foo[key]).  It looks even better without the brackets.

        Wayne Conrad