From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
Date: 2004-01-24T09:29:57+09:00
Subject: Re: Why is to_a going to be obsolete?

On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 01:17:20AM +0100, Michael Vondung wrote:
> As one of those who use Ruby casually, I wholeheartedly concur. to_s
> and to_i were among the first things I learned, so to_a always made
> perfect sense to me. [ *o ] may make more sense to more experienced
> programmers, but it merely seems more cryptic to _me_. :)  Anyway,
> isn't that a bit inconsistent?

No, because to_a will still exist and will still be the way to get
arrays out of objects which are collections of some sort.  

All that's going away is the default to_a of class Object, which
returns a one-elment array containing the receiver.  That has never
made sense to me.  I mean, if I have an object obj and I want an
array containing it, I would just write [ obj ].  If the object may
or may not already be an array and I don't want to add a level of
arrayness if it is, which feels fuzzy but never mind, then I would
write [ *obj ].  There's no new syntax there; that's just how you do
that in Ruby.

Calling to_a would not occur to me unless I had something that I knew was 
some sort of collection object and wanted to get its members as an
array - that's what to_a was made for, and that's what it'll *still* be
for even if Object#to_a -> [ self ] goes away.

-Mark