From: GOTO Kentaro <gotoken@...>
Date: 2002-10-02T10:34:14+09:00
Subject: Re: thoughts on typelessness

At Wed, 2 Oct 2002 09:41:17 +0900,
Christoph wrote:
> 
> "GOTO Kentaro" wrote
> ....
> >
> > I think "%s" % obj is a kind of implicit conversion.
> >
> >   % ruby -e 'now = Time.now; def now.to_s() "now" end; puts "%s" % now'
> >   now
> >   %
> 
> The "print String"  conversion seems to follow non obvious
> rules - for example no recursion seems to possible ...

Interesting.  But I did not think so deep.  Maybe I picked up a
special case.

Any way, "to"_ + `an abbreviated class name' looks to mean a special
purpose use because to_str and to_ary are so.

Then I'd like to see any convention like this:

  for name %w(Array Float Integer String)
    module Kernel
      define_method(name){|a| a.send("to_#{name}")} # or to_#{name.downcase}
      private name
    end
  end


-- Gotoken