From: "T. Onoma" <transami@...>
Date: 2004-01-24T14:09:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Why is to_a going to be obsolete?

On Saturday 24 January 2004 01:29 am, Mark J. Reed wrote:
> 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.

ah. thank you mark. that makes this whole subject much more comprehensible.

- T.

P.S. i just noticed that my notion of a ** hashing operator should be enclosed 
in script brackets instead or square brackets, i.e. {**x} not [**x]. not that 
it really matters, but nonetheless...