Equal_rights_for_hash 0.0.4 + Ruby proposal

dubstep · October 4, 2011, 3:30am

Hello,

Although Ruby has a rich set of primitive data types and structures,
the Hash seems neglected in the Ruby API in comparison to its peers:

Class	method	conversion	conversion	conversion
String	String()	to_str	to_s	nil.to_s
Integer	Integer()	to_int	to_i	nil.to_i
Float	Float()	to_float	to_f	nil.to_f
Array	Array()	to_ary	to_a	nil.to_a
Hash	MISSING	to_hash	MISSING	MISSING

To rectify this un-orthogonality, I created a small Ruby library:

(gem) http://rubygems.org/gems/equal_rights_for_hash

(code) https://github.com/sunaku/equal_rights_for_hash

(docs) http://rubydoc.info/gems/equal_rights_for_hash

For more information, please see my proposal to incorporate the
above functionality into Ruby’s core API on the Ruby Issue Tracker:

http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/5008

Thanks for your consideration.

snk · October 4, 2011, 9:18am

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 3:29 AM, Suraj N. Kurapati [email protected]
wrote:

| Float | Float() | to_float | to_f | nil.to_f |

For more information, please see my proposal to incorporate the
above functionality into Ruby’s core API on the Ruby Issue Tracker:

http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/5008

Thanks for your consideration.

Despite the discussion in the bug I still do not understand why this
is useful. I notice that I have never missed this functionality. It
also seems that converting to a Hash is not as straightforward as
converting to an Array (because of the pairing of values). What would
be gained? Can you provide a number of use cases that demonstrate
overall usefulness?

Kind regards

robert